ER Inspector
Find and Evaluate Every Emergency Room Near You
To get the best care possible, your choice of emergency room matters. Look up hospitals ahead of time so you can evaluate where to go in an emergency. Get data on hospital quality measures, such as wait times, patient ratings and citations for emergency room violations. How We've Updated ER Inspector | Download ProPublica's Emergency Room Planning Toolkit | About This Data
This database was last updated in September 2019. It should only be used as
a historical snapshot.Researchers can find more recent data on timely and
effective care in the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services’
hospitals datasets
and
guidance about hospital regulations.
If you are having a heart attack or life-threatening emergency, call 911.
Find Emergency Rooms Near You
For example: 874 State Street CT, 11216
Don’t see your ER? Find out why it might be missing.
ER Wait Times & Violations by State
For each state, we chart the average amount of time that patients wait in emergency rooms before they get sent home or are admitted to the hospital. We also include the percentage of hospitals that have been cited for at least one ER-related violation, as identified during the investigation of a complaint, since 2015. For every measure, lower numbers are better. Experts caution that very small differences between hospitals for a given measure are unlikely to correspond to noticeable differences in the real world.
Notes
“Average time” refers to the median wait time (the midpoint of all patients' wait times). References to “doctor or medical practitioner” indicate a doctor, nurse practitioner or physician's assistant. CMS reports the CT scan quality measure as the percentage of patients who received a scan within 45 minutes. We have reversed that measure so that all measures follow a “lower is better” pattern.
Additional design and development by Mike Tigas and Sisi Wei.
Sources
All data comes from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. Detailed quality measures at the hospital, state and national level were last updated September 2019. Most data was collected between October 2017 and October 2018. Data on ER-related violations is from January 2015 to June 2019.
Additional Info
How We've Updated ER Inspector | Download ProPublica's Emergency Room Planning Toolkit | About This Data
Don’t See Your ER?
In some cases we aren’t able to identify the exact location of a hospital, so it doesn’t appear on our mapped search results. However, it may still be in our database – try looking for it in the list of hospitals on each state's page.
In other cases, the hospital is missing from our database because it doesn't have an emergency department.
In other cases, the hospital is missing from the federal government’s Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) data. There are a couple of reasons why a hospital isn’t included in CMS data: it may not participate in Medicare, or it may share a certification number with another hospital (common across large hospital systems).
If you notice a hospital missing from our database, please first check if you can find it on CMS' website, and that it is listed as having an ER. If so, please email us with the hospital name and address.