Hospital 'Boarding' Of Patients In The Emergency Department Increasingly Common, 2017-24.

When hospital beds are scarce, patients "board" in the emergency department until an inpatient bed becomes available. Using national data on 46.2 million hospitalizations, 2017-24, we documented rising burdens of hospital boarding in the US. At the peak in January 2022, 40.1 percent of patients boarded for more than four hours, and 6.3 percent boarded for more than twenty-four hours.