Annals of emergency medicine
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Comparative Study
Do Patients Respond to Posted Emergency Department Wait Times: Time-Series Evidence From the Implementation of a Wait Time Publication System in Hamilton, Canada.
One proposed solution to prolonged emergency department (ED) wait times is a publicly available website that displays estimated ED wait times. This could provide information to patients so that they may choose sites with low wait times, which has the potential to smooth the overall wait times in EDs across a health system. We describe the effect of a novel city-wide ED wait time website on patient volume distributions throughout the city of Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. ⋯ After the implementation of a public wait time website, elevated wait times led to fewer patients at the same site but more patient visits at other sites. This may be consistent with the wait time tracker inducing patients to avoid sites with high wait times and instead visit alternate sites in Hamilton, but only when wait times were very high.
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We describe how the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic affected the economics of emergency department care (ED). ⋯ The COVID-19 pandemic adversely impacted the economics of ED care, with large drops in overall and, in particular, low-acuity ED visits, necessitating reductions in clinical hours. Staffing cutbacks could not match reduced revenue at small EDs with minimum emergency physician coverage requirements.