Munson's Busiest Summer Ever? Here's What The Numbers Say

Back in July, leaders at Munson Medical Center (MMC) told The Ticker the hospital had just experienced its busiest week ever. That story ran on July 20, less than a week before the mass stabbing incident at Walmart that brought 11 wounded patients to Munson, including six in critical condition.

With summer now in the rearview, we crunched the numbers on everything from inpatient census statistics to Emergency Department (ED) presentations, and then compared those numbers to last summer to see if the trend continued.

193: The number of patients admitted to the MMC ED on Monday, July 14. “I’m not aware of a higher number than that [in hospital history],” Dr. Thomas Schermerhorn, MMC’s chief medical officer, told The Ticker at the time.

Is that patient load a daily record? According to Brian Lawson, marketing and communications manager for Munson Healthcare’s central region, it’s hard to say. That number is at least the highest single-day patient intake at the ED since 2018. Before that is anyone’s guess.

“Data collection parameters prior to 2018 make it difficult to say whether this was an all-time record,” Lawson shares.

Still, 193 is actually only slightly above last summer’s peak, when a mid-July day saw 188 patients admitted to the ED.

155-165: The average patient count for a typical summer day at the Munson ED, according to Schermerhorn.

455: The highest daily inpatient census ever recorded at MMC, which happened on July 9. That number is up significantly from a year ago, when Munson leaders cited a summer peak inpatient census – and then-all-time hospital record – of “400-plus” patients. Notably, MMC is licensed for 442 inpatient beds.

“Those extra patients were likely waiting in the ER and/or post-op acute care unit for an inpatient bed,” Lawson says when asked about the disparity between MMC's capacity maximum and the 455 figure. “That number is reported at 9am and we may discharge 100 or more patients over the course of a day, a number of them happening in the morning so that number steadily declines.”

14: The number of days in July where MMC hit an inpatient census of 390 people are higher. On seven of those days, the number topped 400.

50,000+: Approximate number of patients that cycle through the MMC ED each year.

55%: Share of total MMC ED visits so far this year that occurred across the months of June, July, and August. That’s markedly higher than this same point last year, when just 41 percent of the year’s ED traffic had taken place between June 1 and August 31.

18,804: Total patient visits to the ED between May 1 and August 31 this year. That number is up compared to last year, but not as much as you might think. For summer 2024, MMC saw 18,272 patient presentations at the ED across those same four months, making 2025’s statistic a 2.9 percent uptick.

12,443: Calls to Munson’s Ask-A-Nurse Hotline across May, June, July, and August. That number is actually down slightly (3.32 percent) from summer 2024, which saw 12,870 calls. Munson launched Ask-A-Nurse as a free 24/7 service during the peak of the pandemic, with a goal of helping patients avoid unnecessary ED visits. It is particularly crucial in summer as a means of answering basic health-related questions for patients.

6%: Share of patients at the ED this summer who were treated via the Quick Care Zone, another initiative launched in recent years to minimize strain on the emergency room.

The Quick Care Zone is a designated area within the ED where patients who score low on Munson’s triage scale – called the Emergency Severity Index (ESI) – can be prioritized. It consists of curtained spaces where patients receive “vertical care,” or treatment in a recliner rather than a hospital bed. The goal is to see, treat, and discharge those patients faster than would be possible through traditional ED treatment pathways. The initiative launched via pilot program last July, and ended up accounting for 7.5 percent of ED patient visits for the summer of 2024.

48%: The decline in Quick Care Zone visits from July to August this year. Similarly, last year saw a 55 percent dip for the same month-over-month period. Lawson sees the decline as an illustration of just how much peak summer traffic at the ED comes from out-of-towners. “[The downward trend] coincides with slowing tourism, as kids downstate and in the surrounding states go back to school,” he says.

450: Average number of monthly “tele-admissions” at the ED for July and August. Munson Healthcare rolled out several mobile telehealth units at MMC in July, including two in the ER. At times of high traffic, those units allow Munson to “flex for fluctuating capacity,” per Schermerhorn. Lawson says the vast majority of patients are still admitted by in-person doctors, but these 900 or so “have been through triage, seen in-person by an ED provider, and then a provider via telehealth will admit them. From that point forward they are cared for by an in-house provider.”

21%: Increase in MMC admissions for stroke for the May-August time period, compared to the same four-month span last year.

16%: Year-over-year uptick in “emergent trauma cases” for the May-August period, compared to last summer.

These two increases in certain types of medical emergencies came despite what Lawson says were otherwise relatively flat trends for Munson’s ESI triage numbers.

For reference, the ESI rates patients on a scale of 1-5, with scores of 1-2 indicating severe or even life-threatening conditions. 4s or 5s, meanwhile, denote patients with less severe or emergent needs – to the point that they could skip the ED and pursue care at a primary care or urgent care office instead. Typically, ESI numbers break down along a bell curve. Last summer, for instance, 4.2 percent of patients were scored as 1s, 31.4 percent as 2s, 49.5 percent as 3s, and 13.5 percent as 4s, and 1.2 percent as 5s.