A new study from Harvard Medical School researchers at Cambridge Health Alliance has found that emergency room wait times in the United States are getting significantly longer, especially for the severely ill. The study, published today in the journal Health Affairs, analyzed differences in wait times between 2004 and 1997.

Researchers have found that about half of all emergency room patients waited 30 minutes or more before being examined by a doctor in 2004, a stunning 36 percent increase from a median wait time of 22 minutes in 1997. Not even critical patients such as those experiencing a heart attack have received their treatment in time: most of them had to wait 20 minutes or more to be examined in 2004, up from eight minutes in 1997.

"If a loved one has a heart attack, it doesn't matter whether he is well insured. He still has a one-in-four chance of waiting over 50 minutes, because of ED (emergency department) overcrowding, and this wait will only increase," Dr. Robert Lowe, an emergency medicine expert at Oregon Health and Science University, said to Reuters.

The worrying figures are a result of both the reduction in the number of hospitals which run emergency rooms and the increase of ER visits from 93.4 million in 1994 to 110.2 million in 2004.

"It's hard to ignore the fact that several hundred ERs have closed their doors, and we've seen an increase in the number of patients using ERs. Plus, there are a number of internal factors contributing like bottlenecks because of a lack of inpatient bed space and a lack of specialists available to treat patients," said study author Dr. Andrew Wilper, a fellow in general internal medicine at Harvard Medical School and an internist with the Cambridge Health Alliance.

The Northeast had the longest wait times of any region in the U.S. and urban hospitals' wait times were twice as long as those in rural hospitals, the study has found.

An abstract of the study can be found here.