Don’t see your ER? Find out why it might be missing.

Percentage of hospitals in the state with at least one ER-related violation since 2015

Average time, in hours, patients spend in the emergency room before being admitted to the hospital

Average time, in hours, patients spend in the emergency room before being sent home (if not admitted)

For each state, we chart the average amount of time that patients wait in emergency rooms before they get sent home or are admitted to the hospital. We also include the percentage of hospitals that have been cited for at least one ER-related violation, as identified during the investigation of a complaint, since 2015. For every measure, lower numbers are better. Experts caution that very small differences between hospitals for a given measure are unlikely to correspond to noticeable differences in the real world.

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Notes

“Average time” refers to the median wait time (the midpoint of all patients' wait times). References to “doctor or medical practitioner” indicate a doctor, nurse practitioner or physician's assistant. CMS reports the CT scan quality measure as the percentage of patients who received a scan within 45 minutes. We have reversed that measure so that all measures follow a “lower is better” pattern.

Additional design and development by Mike Tigas and Sisi Wei.

Sources

All data comes from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. Detailed quality measures at the hospital, state and national level were last updated September 2019. Most data was collected between October 2017 and October 2018. Data on ER-related violations is from January 2015 to June 2019.

Additional Info

How We've Updated ER Inspector | Download ProPublica's Emergency Room Planning Toolkit | About This Data

Don’t See Your ER?

In some cases we aren’t able to identify the exact location of a hospital, so it doesn’t appear on our mapped search results. However, it may still be in our database – try looking for it in the list of hospitals on each state's page.

In other cases, the hospital is missing from our database because it doesn't have an emergency department.

In other cases, the hospital is missing from the federal government’s Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) data. There are a couple of reasons why a hospital isn’t included in CMS data: it may not participate in Medicare, or it may share a certification number with another hospital (common across large hospital systems).

If you notice a hospital missing from our database, please first check if you can find it on CMS' website, and that it is listed as having an ER. If so, please email us with the hospital name and address.