At Chestnut Hill Hospital, putting clinical before clerical in the emergency department begins with medical assessment from the moment patients arrive.

If you’ve ever visited a hospital emergency department, you know there’s usually a pattern to every visit: Start at registration, then prepare for the sometimes-lengthy wait to be seen. That’s a pattern we’ve worked hard to break at Temple Health – Chestnut Hill Hospital.

Across eight years in the emergency department, I have treated or personally witnessed just about everything, from everyday illness to life-threatening trauma. But what is routine for us is anything but routine for our patients.

At Temple Health, we are deeply committed to serving our local community. That begins with ensuring all patients have access to extraordinary care, and we are constantly working to improve the processes that support swift, high-quality patient treatment.

The quality of the care we provide goes hand in hand with how efficiently we can deliver it. In emergency medicine, that means reducing your wait time and returning you to the activities you enjoy. Those commitments have driven our work to reimagine the patient experience in the emergency department.

It begins at registration, where Chestnut Hill Hospital prioritizes “clinical over clerical.” Here’s what that means: Our registration station is always occupied by a registered nurse, or another staff member with clinical expertise, who applies their training to more thoroughly assess your current condition to help expedite your care.

Depending on the day-to-day volume of our emergency department, it usually takes about 10 minutes for a patient to go from registration to what we call “Provider in Triage.” This is where a physician or a physician assistant will bring you into a private room to further assess you and develop a deeper understanding of the reason for your visit.

While you may return to our waiting area, this isn’t a permanent measure. It’s usually only long enough for us to complete laboratory tests of the samples we have collected, prepare the prescription that we have deemed vital for your care, or make a room available — if admitting you is necessary.

At Chestnut Hill Hospital, our goal is to get you from “door to doctor” in 45 minutes or less — one of the quickest turnaround times at any emergency department in the city. (On average, wait time is closer to 30 minutes.)

Data released this summer by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) confirm that this isn’t unique to our region. Nationally, the median wait time at an emergency department is 2 hours, 42 minutes. (The data, for the 12-month period from Oct. 1, 2024 – Sept. 30, 2025, exclude patients who required a transfer to another facility and those requiring psychiatric and mental health treatment.)

Here in Pennsylvania, the average wait time is more than 3 hours. That ranks 43rd in the country.

Our “Provider in Triage” model at Chestnut Hill Hospital is reducing wait times and improving the number of patients we treat annually.

Over the last year, between Oct. 1, 2025 – Oct. 1, 2026, Chestnut Hill Hospital cut in half the rate at which patients leave our emergency department without being seen. Reducing that figure allowed us to treat 1,200 more patients than we did in the previous year.

We understand how busy your day is. The last thing you were expecting was to see us in the emergency department at Chestnut Hill. But if you are not feeling well, no matter the cause, we’re here for you.

Samuel R. Eldrich, MD, is a board‑certified emergency medicine physician and medical director of the emergency department at Temple Health – Chestnut Hill Hospital. Dr. Eldrich is one of 296 Temple Health physicians named to Philadelphia magazine’s 2026 “Top Doctors” list.