ED Wait Times Touted Online, But Docs Point to a Dangerous Trend

Kiley says InQuickER has calculated return on investment for participating hospitals of between 200% and 2000% because patients who buy into the service won't go somewhere else.

InQuickER has experimented with various price points "and discovered that for $24.99, people absolutely love the service. They say 'This is the best $24.99 I ever spent.' And we're coming up on 3,000 patients who have used this across all of our sites."

ACEP is concerned that some seriously ill patient may attempt a much longer drive to a more distant hospital with a shorter advertised wait time, or one offering advance registration, yet not make it there fast enough.

"Patients don't understand how emergency rooms work, and expect to be taken in order they came, one, two three ...They don't understand that we always take the sickest patients first," Schneider says.

Nevertheless, it is the way some hospitals hope to woo patients, a strategy Schneider thinks is ill-advised.

"A better thing to work on is to find out what's jamming up your emergency department in the first place, get your patients on the floor, get them feeling better rather than working to post your times. I would save my money, and let the emergency department take care of emergencies."

At Sacred Heart, Cresci acknowledges that initially, doctors in the emergency department "weren't all that hot on the idea. They were worried it would set false expectations, and some people would complain that, 'Hey, I saw on your Web site there was nobody waiting, and now there's five people.'"

She adds that typically, emergency room doctors don't want to tell people how long a wait there might be, "because you could have five ambulances come in all at once. So we do have a disclaimer, and we do update the site every five minutes.

"And so far, we have not had one complaint."