Emergency room wait times at Butler Memorial Hospital are less than half the state and national averages, according to Hospital Compare, the Medicare website that offers hospital information online.

Emergency department patients wait an average of 13 minutes at Butler Memorial before they see a health care professional, according to the website. State and national averages hover around 30 minutes.

“If we weren’t efficient, we’d be in trouble on a daily basis,” said Dr. David Rottinghaus, medical director of the emergency department.

The hospital is on track to see 50,000 patients through its emergency department this year, Rottinghaus said.

“Fifty thousand is busy,” he said, up 1,000 to 2,000 over 2012.

To keep wait times down, the hospital took on a Highmark improvement process that included every hospital department that touched emergency medicine.

“I think it’s created a culture of teamwork across the whole organization,” said Chrissy Emrick, director of emergency services.

The team used a stopwatch to map out its processes and to distinguish between value-added time and waste, Emrick said. Value-added time benefits the patient or the staff, she said.

Based on those results, the team redefined and standardized processes.

Emrick said, “We did tons of education with the entire house ... housekeeping, physicians, even area EMS (emergency medical services) ... outpatient units, OR, the radiology lab — everybody who touches anyone who touches our patient.”

Rottinghaus agreed: “A lot of other things have to go well for (efficiency on the front end) to occur. It’s an all-hands-on-deck approach.”

No staff was added to accommodate the increase in emergency department visits, which Emrick attributes to the hospital’s efforts to streamline procedures.

In the northwestern part of Butler County, a trip to the emergency room might mean a trip to the Grove City Medical Center. Although smaller than Butler Memorial, it also has a 13-minute emergency room wait time, according to Hospital Compare.

“We started triage at the bedside” to reduce wait times, said Lynette Fair, clinical manager of the emergency department.

Patients there go straight to vacant beds. A nurse begins a bedside assessment, and a registration clerk visits the patient to get information on that person, she said.

“In a traditional emergency room, a physician cannot get to a patient,” Fair said. “They’re somewhere else. This way, there’s nothing holding back the doctor from seeing the patient quickly.”

Fair said emergency room visits reached 16,972 in 2012, an increase of 500 patients. The medical center also did not add more staff.

“Working on wait times stops bottlenecks,” she said. “We’re able to manage it.”

Rottinghaus and Fair agree that emergency room patients are sicker now than they have been in the past. Fair attributes the trend to the poor economy, which has contributed to a lack of health insurance among some patients.

There also is a shortage of primary care physicians, she said.

In Butler, the hospital has opened four urgent care centers that enable physicians to care for people when no primary care physician is available and patients don’t want to take a trip to the emergency room either, although Rottinghaus is quick to point out that their services don’t replicate primary care.

“Within the emergency department, one of the challenges is that there are people with widely varying needs, Rottinghaus said. “For example, the needs of someone with a heart attack are vastly different from those of someone with a laceration or sprained ankle.”

The challenge, he said, is to treat patients quickly, accurately and with care and compassion.

“People take their health for granted until they get sick,” Rottinghaus said. “They also want their health restored in as little time as possible.”

Patients who visit urgent care centers generally are seen and have their needs taken care of in about an hour, he said.