How Long Would You Wait in the ER in Sarasota?

If you're not much for waiting at the emergency room in Sarasota, Doctors Hospital of Sarasota will get you in and out the fastest, according to a new federal database on ER care.

At Doctors, patients only waited 16 minutes before being seen by a doctor or nurse, which is almost twice as fast as the national and state average of 30 minutes. Sarasota Memorial Hospital patients waited 75 minutes, according to the database. 

Florida is famous for its hospital billboards flashing the average ER wait time up and down highways, but this newly released data finds how long the wait really is during the course of a sample period.

A new federal database publicly released wait times averages, measuring the wait in several categories. Data for Sarasota hospitals were collected from Jan. 1 to March 31, 2012. (View the Sarasota results in the PDF with this story.)

Key measures of ER efficiency have been posted from hospitals taking part across the country,according to a report in HealthLeaders Media:

“With precious little fanfare, Uncle Sam last month rolled out a big, fat database with seven measures comparing a service that many people—healthcare providers and patients alike—consider the most critical any hospital can provide,”writer Cheryl Clark wrote Thursday.

Data collected in 2011 and early 2012 also tracked how long it took for an ER patient to be seen by a healthcare professional and how long the wait was to get a bed if they needed admission. Other data showed how long patients spent in the ER before being sent home and whether they received a brain scan if they might have suffered a stroke. 

What might jump out at people is the first set of numbers for Timely Emergency Department Care—a whopping five-plus hours (306 minutes) in the ER at Sarasota Memorial before being admitted as an inpatient, but not everyone requires an extended stay at the hospital. Still, it is above the national average of 277 minutes, and above the Florida average of 315 minutes. Doctors Hospital, ranks below both the state and national averages at 206 minutes.

Doctors Hospital also outperforms Sarasota memorial for how long you spend at the ER before being sent home—134 minutes versus 182 minutes. The national average is 140 minutes while the average in Florida is 160 minutes.

Sometimes, the wait is so long, that some people give up and go home. More than 1,500 patients left at Sarasota Memorial during the three-month period. That's about 3 percent of the 50,858 patients. Doctors Hospital reported that none of its 11,910 patients during that time left the ER before being seen.

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Clark interviewed Dr. Jesse Pines, an emergency room doctor and researcher who directs the center for healthcare quality at George Washington University.

“The theory is that when hospitals report this information, it makes them focus on it, and improve throughout their [Emergency Department],” Pines was quoted as saying.

“But it’s very hard to do. Certain performance measures are easier to fix—like simple process measures like giving patients an aspirin—than improving ED throughput, which involves development of interdisciplinary teams.” 

How To Find Hospital ER Wait Times

First go to the Hospital Compare website. Then type in your ZIP code, city or local hospital. When a list of hospitals is displayed, put a checkmark next to two or three hospitals.

Scroll down to a yellow button labeled Compare Now, and click to display more details. Look for a tab called Timely and Effective Care and click that.

Finally, scroll down to a section called Timely Emergency Department Care. A green button allows you to “View More Details,” displaying something like this page comparing  Sarasota Memorial and Doctors Hospital.