My ER Wait Times Experiment

Last year, I became interested in emergency room wait times when a family member needed medical attention but did not want to spend his day waiting for treatment.

I had recently seen an article about the growing number of hospitals publishing their wait times online, but since that information is scattered across multiple sites, I found it a challenge to quickly compare and evaluate wait times in a given geographic area.

In addition, I found that there was no mechanism for people to independently report how long they waited to be seen by a physician.

As an experiment, I built ERwaittimes.us to aggregate current wait times published by hospitals nationwide and to provide a way for people to add their own wait times for every emergency room and urgent care. So far, it’s just a simple site that needs a lot more development. Please let me know what you think of the idea and how it could be improved.