Is Keeping Patients Waiting in the ER a Good Business Move?

Those long emergency room waits that we are all familiar with may be good for a hospital’s bottom line, a couple of academic emergency medicine docs write today in Slate. How’s that? Patients who show up at the emergency room are less likely than patients admitted to the hospital by a staff physician to need lucrative, procedure-driven care. And those ER patients may be more likely than those admitted by a doctor to have bad insurance or no insurance at all, they argue. (Though it is worth noting that one recent analysis found that the well-off made up much of the recent growth in ER traffic). A hospital only has so many inpatient beds, so it makes economic sense to fill the beds up with the lucrative, well-insured patients admitted by staff physicians. That creates an incentive to keep ER patients in a holding pattern,... [read full story]