Chances are most people have experienced the effects of emergency room boarding. That’s when a patient is admitted for treatment, but stuck in the ER for hours due to a lack of in-patient beds.
It’s an issue impacting more than 1.6 million state residents seeking care in emergency departments each year, according to publicly-available hospital boarding data.
In 2023, CCEP led efforts to create the country's first publicly-available dashboard on ER boarding data.
Boarding numbers from 2024 were released in January. Now, new numbers from 2025 are out. They show ER boarding rates across Connecticut dropped by less than a percentage point from the year prior.
Dr. Christopher Moore, a CCEP board member, said hospitals could do better.
“We know that there are solutions to boarding,” he said.
Those solutions are unique to each hospital, but include managing patient flow and staffing patterns, he said. “If hospitals feel like it's a priority to not have boarding, we feel they can really make steps to resolve it.”
A problem with many causes
ER boarding is not just limited to patients waiting for an in-patient bed at the hospital. Patients can also be held up in emergency rooms as they wait for transfers to nursing homes, rehab clinics or psychiatric hospitals.
Dr. Douglas Smith, director of the board at CCEP, said the association for emergency physicians was continuing to work with state lawmakers to help patients flow in and out of hospital ERs more smoothly.
A lack of available behavioral health services, along with insurance delays and no available beds at rehab and nursing home facilities all contribute to ER boarding delays, he said.
Another CCEP board member, Dr. Daniel Freess, said in some cases, hospitals are fully staffed and have a near 100% occupancy, which is indicative of a need for increased capacity.
“At other hospitals, boarding is at least partially driven by staffing shortages that decrease existing available capacity,” he said.
How hospitals stack up
Moore pointed out that some of the hospitals did not have much boarding to start with, but did relatively well in reducing what they had. “The other side of it is there are hospitals that didn't do well and actually went up with boarding [volumes],” he said.
Boarding rates were the highest at Hartford Hospital with 62% of patients admitted to in-patient beds, waiting an average of 8.9 hours in the ER. Boarding rates and wait times were also high at MidState Medical Center in Meriden (7.7 hours) and Saint Francis Hospital in Hartford (5.7 hours).
Hartford Hospital said in a statement it was taking steps to mitigate the problem. Efforts include expanding bed capacity across the hospital and a new urgent care center next to the main campus.
“In addition, with a clear goal of improving access to care, Hartford HealthCare launched HHC 24/7, a digital platform used by more than 50,000 people to date, who are able to receive the care they need, anytime and anywhere,” a spokesperson said.
While increasing capacity in the community can divert more patients to seek care outside the ER, doctors said patients are not expected to know when to go to the ER versus urgent care – in case of chest pain, for instance.
Federal law requires ERs to offer care regardless of insurance status.
