About the ERClock Bot
If you're seeing requests from ERClock/1.0 in your server logs, this page explains who we are, what we're doing, and how to get in touch if you have questions or concerns.
What ERClock does
ERClock is a free public service that aggregates live emergency-room and urgent-care wait times published by US hospitals, health systems and clinic chains. We present this publicly available information in a consistent, accessible format so patients can decide which ER or walk-in clinic to go to when minutes matter.
How the bot works
Our bot periodically requests the specific public pages and JSON endpoints that display each facility's current wait time. It identifies itself with the following User-Agent string:
User-Agent
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/145.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 (compatible; ERClock/1.0; +https://erclock.com/bot)
We respect robots.txt
Our bot honors robots.txt directives. If you disallow ERClock there, we stop crawling your site.
Low request volume
We only fetch the specific pages that display wait times. We do not crawl entire sites, follow links, or index content beyond what we need.
Reasonable intervals
We check each source at most every 30 minutes during operating hours, with built-in rate limiting and exponential backoff on errors.
Publicly available data only
We only read data that is already published openly on hospital, health-system or clinic websites. No private systems, no authenticated APIs, no account scraping.
What we collect
From each visit, we typically record:
- The current displayed wait time (e.g. "ER Wait Time: 14 minutes" or "Door-to-Doctor: 24 min")
- The metric type the publisher labels it as (current snapshot, rolling average, median time-to-departure, etc.)
- The timestamp of our reading
- Optional fields the publisher exposes, such as patients-waiting count or department status
We do not collect personal data, cookies, session tokens, or any information beyond what is shown on the public-facing page. We do not submit forms, log in, or interact with the page beyond reading its content.
Sources we read
We integrate one publisher at a time. Currently active source families include:
| Publisher | Method |
|---|
| HCA Healthcare (national) | JSON feed |
| LifePoint Health | JSON feed |
| Trinity Health, Sutter, Mount Sinai, Hackensack Meridian and other Epic MyChart deployments | Public HTML widget |
| Prime Healthcare hospital websites | Homepage HTML |
| Stanford Health Care, UC San Diego, MarinHealth | Public HTML |
| Clockwise.MD urgent-care feeds | JSON feed |
| Cleveland Clinic urgent care | FHIR API |
| Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) | Open dataset |
Hospital identity, addresses, ownership, star ratings and quality measures come from publicly available CMS datasets at data.cms.gov.
Blocking the bot
If you would prefer that we do not access your website, you can block our bot using your robots.txt file:
robots.txt
User-agent: ERClock
Disallow: /
We will honor this directive and stop accessing your site. Alternatively, you can contact us directly and we will remove your facility from our collection schedule immediately.
Working with us
If you manage a hospital, health system or urgent-care chain and would like to work with us rather than block us, we would welcome the conversation. We can adjust our collection approach, switch to an official data feed or API, or ensure that the wait time and reference information we display about your facility is accurate and up to date.
Accuracy and corrections
We do our best to identify facilities correctly by CMS Certification Number (CCN) and to label each reading with its publisher and metric type, but mistakes happen. If you spot a misidentified facility, a stale source URL, or a mislabeled metric, please let us know and we'll fix it.