A flexible simulation platform to quantify and manage emergency department crowding.

Joshua E Hurwitz,James Keesling,Kenneth K Lopiano,Scott A McKinley,Joseph A Tyndall,Jo Ann Lee

doi:10.1186/1472-6947-14-50

Abstract

BackgroundHospital-based Emergency Departments are struggling to provide timely care to a steadily increasing number of unscheduled ED visits. Dwindling compensation and rising ED closures dictate that meeting this challenge demands greater operational efficiency.MethodsUsing techniques from operations research theory, as well as a novel event-driven algorithm for processing priority queues, we developed a flexible simulation platform for hospital-based EDs. We tuned the parameters of the system to mimic U.S. nationally average and average academic hospital-based ED performance metrics and are able to assess a variety of patient flow outcomes including patient door-to-event times, propensity to leave without being seen, ED occupancy level, and dynamic staffing and resource use.ResultsThe causes of ED crowding are variable and require site-specific solutions. For example, in a nationally average ED environment, provider availability is a surprising, but persistent bottleneck in patient flow. As a result, resources expended in reducing boarding times may not have the expected impact on patient throughput. On the other hand, reallocating resources into alternate care pathways can dramatically expedite care for lower acuity patients without delaying care for higher acuity patients. In an average academic ED environment, bed availability is the primary bottleneck in patient flow. Consequently, adjustments to provider scheduling have a limited effect on the timeliness of care delivery, while shorter boarding times significantly reduce crowding. An online version of the simulation platform is available at http://spark.rstudio.com/klopiano/EDsimulation/.ConclusionIn building this robust simulation framework, we have created a novel decision-support tool that ED and hospital managers can use to quantify the impact of proposed changes to patient flow prior to implementation.

Highlights

Hospital-based Emergency Departments are struggling to provide timely care to a steadily increasing number of unscheduled ED visits
Mathematical and computational models have been used to forecast ED crowding on a scale of hours [5], quantify factors contributing to patients leaving without being seen (LWBS) [6,7,8,9], assess patient streaming mechanisms [10,11,12,13,14,15], optimize staff and resource allocation [16,17,18,19,20,21], conduct financial analyses [22,23,24], and study the impact of reducing boarding times [18,23]
Equipping the system with nationally average statistics led to provider-limited dynamics, while using average academic hospital statistics led to bed-limited dynamics

Summary

Introduction

Hospital-based Emergency Departments are struggling to provide timely care to a steadily increasing number of unscheduled ED visits. Introduction Hospital-based Emergency Departments are struggling to provide timely care to a steadily increasing number of unscheduled ED visits [1]. There is a growing consensus that effective management of care delivery in hospital-based EDs requires the support of mathematical and computational modeling. The primary recommendation of the Institute of Medicine’s 2006 report, Hospital-Based Emergency Care: At the Breaking Point was the development of engineering and operations research tools for the purposes of improving ED efficiency and increasing patient flow. Because it is risky to implement management overhauls, a gap remains between ED models and current management practice [25]

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion