September 09, 2026
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Patients at Pennsylvania hospitals wait an average of 3 hours and 30 minutes from the time they enter the emergency department to the time they are discharged, a new analysis shows.
Pennsylvania hospitals have some of the longest emergency room wait times in the United States, according to an analysis of new federal data.
Patients stay an average of 3 hours, 30 minutes in Pennsylvania's emergency rooms before they are discharged. That's the ninth-longest average wait time nationwide, and it's up 33 minutes from 2019, according to the latest data from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.
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The five emergency departments with the longest wait times in Pennsylvania are all in the Philadelphia region. They are Penn Presbyterian Medical Center in University City, at 5 hours and 16 minutes; Laneknau Medical Center in Wynnewood, at 5 hours and 1 minute; Jefferson Einstein Montgomery Hospital in East Norriton, at 4 hours and 56 minutes; Jefferson Health Northeast, which includes three hospitals in Philly and Bucks County, at 4 hours and 50 minutes; and Riddle Memorial Hospital in Media, at 4 hours and 45 minutes.
The research, conducted by the software review site FindEMR, analyzed CMS data from 137 million emergency department visits at 4,017 hospitals in the United States during the year ending Sept. 30, 2025. It measured wait times from the time patients entered emergency departments to the time they were discharged, not including patients who were admitted.
Patients experiencing mental health crises have even longer wait times in emergency departments, averaging 5 hours and 31 minutes. Just over 2% of patients end up leaving emergency departments before being seen, the data shows.
Maryland hospitals have the longest wait times, at 4 hours and 17 minutes. South Dakota hospitals have the shortest, at 2 hours and 17 minutes.
Research shows that long emergency department wait times are associated with worse patient experiences, increased risk to patient safety and delays in care.
Wait times are impacted by overcrowding. And the primary cause of overcrowding is boarding — the time between a patient being admitted to the hospital and actually leaving the emergency department for an inpatient bed, a pair of Boston-area physicians wrote Monday in a op-ed published by the Boston Globe.
"Waits for inpatient hospital beds can last more than 24 hours, and for patients who need to be transferred elsewhere, the wait can sometimes last days or even weeks," wrote Dr. Jonathan Olshaker, former chairman of the emergency department at Boston Medical Center, and Dr. Scott Weiner, an emergency medicine professor at Harvard Medical School. "Strained community hospitals sometimes can't transfer critically ill patients because tertiary care and academic hospitals are already full."
But there is not a quick solution to boarding, they wrote. The issue is caused by several factors, including fewer staffed inpatient beds, hospitals' need to keep inpatient beds filled to sustain financial margins, and a shortage of rehab facilities for patients who need longer times to recover.
