About ERClock

Who runs ERClock

ERClock is built and operated by Matthew Hodson and the team at Search Ventures Ltd. Search Ventures has been operating live wait-time aggregators since 2017, starting with the UK's NHS A&E network. ERClock is the US sister project: same engineering team, same independence, same refusal to take placement money from health systems.

Matthew Hodson

Founder and Director, Search Ventures Ltd

LinkedIn

Why we built ERClock

The US has no single live emergency-room wait-time feed. HCA Healthcare publishes its hospitals on one site, Trinity Health on another, your local independent ED maybe nowhere at all. The result: when you actually need to choose where to go, you have to guess.

It is a simple idea. If one person sat for three hours in an ER waiting room without knowing they could have driven ten minutes further and waited twenty, the next person should not have to. ERClock pulls every public live wait feed we can find, layers them on top of the federal CMS hospital directory, and presents the whole picture in one place. It is free, it carries no advertising from hospitals, and we do not take payment from health systems for placement or priority.

We are also building the same picture for urgent care, where the choice between an ER and a walk-in clinic can mean a five-figure bill difference for the same evening visit.

How we collect the data

Every reading on ERClock is labeled with where it came from. Our pipeline runs in five stages, automated end-to-end:

1. 1
   Source identification

   We track every US health system and urgent-care chain that publishes a live wait time on a public page or API. New sources are added one health system at a time after manual verification that the data is genuine, public, and stably formatted.

2. 2
   Automated collection

   Our scraper, identifying itself as ERClock/1.0, polls each source roughly every 30 minutes. It honors robots.txt, rate-limits its own requests, and only reads pages the public can already see. Full details on the about the bot page.

3. 3
   Community contributions

   For facilities without a live feed, visitors can submit their own recent wait. Submissions are rate-limited per IP and the IP is hashed before storage. Community readings are displayed separately and labeled as such, never mixed with published feeds.

4. 4
   Validation and metric labeling

   Each reading is parsed, sanity-checked (sentinel values like "1138 hr" get filtered), and tagged with the publisher's stated metric type: current snapshot, rolling average, median time-to-departure, and so on. A five-minute "average wait" is not directly comparable to a 30-minute "median time to departure" and we make that explicit in the UI.

5. 5
   Historical aggregation

   We keep a rolling history per facility so we can show hour-of-day patterns, last-24-hour trends, and a typical-for-this-time forecast. CMS quality measures (OP-18, OP-22, OP-23) are imported quarterly and surfaced as long-run context.

Data sources and attribution

ERClock combines several publicly available US data sources. All hospital and health-system names, logos, and trademarks remain the property of their respective owners and appear here solely for the purpose of identification.

• Federal CMS open data for hospital identity, addresses, ownership, star ratings, and historical quality measures, via data.cms.gov Hospital General Information, Timely & Effective Care, Provider of Services, and Doctors and Clinicians datasets.
• Health-system live wait feeds from HCA Healthcare, LifePoint Health, Trinity Health, Sutter Health, Prime Healthcare, Stanford Health Care, UC San Diego, MarinHealth, Hackensack Meridian, Mount Sinai, Houston Methodist, and 20+ other Epic MyChart deployments.
• Urgent-care feeds from Clockwise.MD partner clinics, Cleveland Clinic's public FHIR API, and other walk-in chain APIs as they become available.
• NPPES for the urgent-care facility catalog (federal provider registry).
• OpenStreetMap for map rendering and routing distance calculations (© OpenStreetMap contributors).
• Visitor submissions for facilities that do not publish a live feed of their own.

If you operate a hospital, health system, or urgent-care chain and would prefer we use an official API, switch off scraping, or correct the way we label your data, please get in touch.

Important limitations

We try to be useful, but we are careful about what we claim. Specifically:

• We are not a medical service. ERClock is an informational tool only. It does not provide medical advice and should never replace professional clinical guidance. If you may be having an emergency, call 911.
• We are independent. ERClock has no affiliation with, endorsement by, or sponsorship from any hospital, health system, clinic chain, CMS, or government agency.
• Wait times are estimates. They may be 30 minutes or more out of date and they cannot account for triage acuity, ambulance arrivals, or staffing changes that just happened.
• Different hospitals measure different things. A "current ED wait" is not the same as a "4-hour rolling average" or a "median time to ED departure." We label the metric type on every reading.
• We do not claim to list every ER or urgent care in the US. Coverage is improving but uneven. A facility we do not list is not necessarily closed.
• We do not show insurance network status. Going to an out-of-network ER can result in five-figure bills. Verify network status with your insurer before non-emergency care.
• We do not take placement money. No hospital, system, or chain pays us to be listed, ranked higher, or marked as "recommended." Everything you see is sorted by wait, distance, or quality, never by ad spend.

The full legal disclaimer lives on the disclaimer page.

What we believe