Health and Healthcare

This State Has the Longest ER Waiting Time in America

Douglas A. McIntyre

Published: February 28, 2022 12:30 pm

The COVID-19 pandemic radically changed the way America’s hospitals work and the burden put on hospital staff, doctors and nurses. In hard-hit areas, intensive care bed availability disappeared. Occupancy of other hospital beds was also turned over to people who contracted the virus. Emergency rooms overflowed and people were in makeshift beds, in some cases for days. Hospitals began to lose key personnel because these people felt entirely overwhelmed or became infected.

Emergency rooms have been the “front doors” to hospitals for years, particularly facilities that treated people without insurance or other means to cover medical expenses. The spread of COVID-19 undermined the ability to perform this function.

Between the normal flow of emergency room cases and COVID-19 patients, some facilities have basically closed to anything other than the most severe cases.

According to research by IT service automation company SysAiD, emergency room median waiting periods in all 50 states topped 100 hours over the period of the study that which ran from January 7, 2020, to March 31, 2021. That means it caught most of the serious inflows during the worst of the pandemic. The conclusions were based on Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services data.

The most notable conclusion of the study was that sparsely populated states had the shortest emergency room waiting times and crowded states had the longest. The state with the shortest waiting time was North Dakota at 104 minutes, followed by South Dakota at 113 and Nebraska at 114. The state with the longest waiting time was Maryland, the only state with an average wait time of more than 200 minutes.

These are the 20 states with the longest ER waiting times:

• Maryland (228 minutes)
• Delaware (195 minutes)
• Massachusetts (189 minutes)
• Rhode Island (185 minutes)
• New York (184 minutes)
• Arizona (176 minutes)
• New Jersey (173 minutes)
• Connecticut (166 minutes)
• California (164 minutes)
• Illinois (157 minutes)
• North Carolina (157 minutes)
• Oregon (157 minutes)
• Pennsylvania (157 minutes)
• Florida (155 minutes)
• New Hampshire (154 minutes)
• Virginia (154 minutes)
• Michigan (153 minutes)
• Kentucky (151 minutes)
• South Carolina (151 minutes)
• New Mexico (150 minutes)

Click here to see which 46 general hospitals received the top hospital award in 2021.