Emergency room visits take longer in Philadelphia, compared to the national average.
You can expect to spend three and a half hours inside an emergency room in the Philadelphia region during a typical visit, according to the latest data from Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.
That's 50 minutes longer than the national average for emergency room visits.
Emergency department visits got longer at three out of every four hospitals in the Philadelphia region between 2021 to 2024.
The Inquirer analyzed CMS data for 33 hospitals in Philadelphia, Bucks, Chester, Delaware and Montgomery counties in Pennsylvania, as well as Burlington and Camden in New Jersey.
Check out the table below to see how your hospital performed:
Lots of factors affect hospitals' average time for an emergency department visit, including number of patients, hospital capacity, staffing, and severity of cases.
According to CMS, longer stays may be a sign of understaffing or overcrowding, which could delay treatment.
Two hospitals where the length of an emergency room visit increased significantly were in Delaware County. Riddle Hospital, owned by Main Line Health, jumped 64 minutes and Trinity Health's Mercy Fitzgerald Hospital rose 54 minutes. Lankenau Hospital, also owned by Main Line Health, was not far behind with a 52 minute increase.
The two health systems attributed the change to increased patient volume after nearby Delaware County Memorial Hospital and Springfield Hospital, both formerly part of Crozer Health, closed in 2022.
" READ MORE: Eight additional ambulances will start service in Delaware County Saturday following Crozer's closure
Declining primary care and mental health resources in the county have also contributed to busier emergency departments, both health systems said.
Cooper University Hospital in New Jersey saw the greatest improvement in emergency department visit time, shaving off 13 minutes from the average visit length between 2021 and 2024.
Cooper said it had managed to make emergency visits shorter, even as volume and hospitalizations rose, by focusing on a hospital-wide strategy that calls for emergency department staff to coordinate closely with other departments, such as imaging, pharmacy, and transportation.
"We can order the X-ray but if it takes two hours to get the patient from point A to B, we're never going to see as many patients," said Andrew Nyce, vice chair of Cooper's Department of Emergency Medicine.