Alan Kent, president and CEO of Meadows Regional Medical Center in Vidalia, Ga., was a champion for implementing lean principles in the hospital’s emergency department. Photo by Gary Meek

Emergency rooms in the United States aren’t known for their efficiency. Data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) shows that the 110 million people who visited an emergency room in 2004 spent an average of 3.3 hours from check-in to physician visit to discharge.

American emergency rooms aren’t just inefficient, they’re facing a crisis. Most ER visits are made by the elderly or the uninsured at a time when the number of hospital emergency departments has been cut by 14 percent. Other CDC statistics show that ER visits by adults aged 22 to 49 increased 19 percent while visits by Americans aged 50 to 64 grew 15 percent.

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