A research letter today in JAMA Network Open shows that, in the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, US hospitals dealing with patient surges held emergency-department (ED) patients in places like hallways while awaiting an inpatient bed for a median of 6.6 hours, far longer than the Joint Commission's 4-hour standard.

The Joint Commission, a US-based healthcare accreditation organization that sets standards for hospitals and other medical settings, has deemed ED boarding—or holding admitted patients in the ED, often in hallways, as they wait for a bed to open up—a patient safety risk.

Researchers from Yale University and the University of Michigan parsed aggregated monthly hospital data through a voluntary peer benchmarking service offered by the electronic health record vendor Epic Systems, Corp. from January 2020 to December 2021. More hospitals reported benchmarking data as the pandemic progressed, rising from 1,289 in January 2020 to 1,769 by study end.

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