NEW YORK CITY— Patients at some New York City hospitals spend hours in emergency departments, according to Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services data.
St. Barnabas Hospital in the Bronx reported the city's longest median emergency room stay, at 301 minutes, or more than five hours.
NewYork-Presbyterian/Queens followed at 280 minutes, while Elmhurst Hospital Center reported 278 minutes.
Across the 31 New York City hospitals reporting data, the median emergency room stay was 218 minutes, or 3 hours and 38 minutes.
People experiencing homelessness and serious mental illness often cycle between city streets, hospitals, shelters and jails because of gaps in mental health care and inadequate coordination between agencies, a 2025 report from the New York City Comptroller's Office found.
The report noted that hospitals sometimes release patients back onto the streets after only a few hours because of a shortage of inpatient beds, while inadequate connections to housing and follow-up treatment can leave vulnerable patients without the support they need after discharge.
Many New York City hospitals facing the steepest Medicare penalties for patient readmissions have the shortest emergency room stays.
South Brooklyn Health, which faced the largest penalty in the analysis at 2.09 percent, reported a median emergency room stay of 160 minutes, the second shortest in the City.
Harlem Hospital Center, which recorded the City's shortest median stay at 144 minutes, faced a 1.34 percent penalty.
Meanwhile, St. Barnabas Hospital, which recorded the City's longest stay, faced a 0.72 percent penalty. NewYork-Presbyterian/Queens, with the second-longest stay, faced a penalty of just 0.01 percent.
The federal readmission program reduces Medicare payments to hospitals based on their performance in preventing certain patients from returning for unplanned hospital stays within 30 days of discharge.
Of the 29 New York City hospitals matched across the two datasets, eight faced Medicare cuts of at least 1 percent. Their median emergency room stay measured 200 minutes, compared with 224 minutes among the 21 hospitals facing smaller cuts.
Six of the eight hospitals facing larger penalties reported emergency room stays below the City median of 218 minutes.
Researchers found that patients whose initial ER visits lasted less than four hours returned within 72 hours at a rate of 5.8 percent, compared with 4.2 percent among patients whose visits lasted between four and 24 hours.
Shorter visits were also more likely to end with nonspecific diagnoses.
The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality has also identified gaps in discharge planning as a potential contributor to hospital readmissions.
Its review of discharge planning and transitions of care explains that patients may leave hospitals without fully understanding medication changes, follow-up appointments or instructions for managing their conditions.
When discharge information is provided at the last minute, patients and caregivers may feel rushed and unprepared to manage care at home.
The emergency room data measure the time between a patient's arrival and departure.
They cover discharged patients but exclude psychiatric and mental health patients and those transferred to another facility.
Here is a searchable table of New York City hospitals and their median emergency room times, based on federal data from Oct. 1, 2024, through Sept. 30, 2025.
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