In an ideal health care system, patients with non urgent complaints would not visit urgent centers. Yet the premise of the June 18th article "Hospitals try to improve emergency wait times" is that to solve our over-crowding problem in emergency rooms we need to streamline the care. But this solution addresses only the symptom and not the underlying disorder: too many patients with non-urgent illness seek care in urgent centers.

Inappropriate use of the emergency room is a public health emergency. Half of all children who go to the Johns Hopkins Hospital ER has a non-urgent issue. The care provided in emergency rooms is fragmented; ER physicians often do not have access to patients' medical charts and have no time to communicate what care was provided in the ER to the patients' regular doctor. Emergency room care is also much more expensive than that provided in clinics.

If we want to address an underlying cause of emergency room overcrowding, our resources should be used to educate patients about the importance of seeing their regular doctor and the benefits of continuity of care, perhaps even make a referral to a primary care provider when needed, and to explain to patients what constitutes inappropriate use of the ER.

Patients deserve better than just shorter ER wait times. Shouldn't we help them avoid the line all together?

Dr. Alex B. Blum, Nidhi Bouri, Victor Dinglas, David Diwa, Vinutha Gowda and Dr. Rania Rabie, Baltimore.

The writers are masters of public health candidates at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.