How does Imaging Impact Patient Flow in Emergency Departments?
This addresses patient safety and public health issues in emergency departments by optimizing imaging processes, though it is incremental as it applies existing simulation methods to specific data.
The study tackled the problem of emergency department overcrowding by analyzing the impact of imaging delays and order bundling on patient flow, finding that reducing imaging delays and bundling 10% of orders significantly reduced patient time in the ED with p-value < 0.05.
Emergency Department (ED) overcrowding continues to be a public health issue as well as a patient safety issue. The underlying factors leading to ED crowding are numerous, varied, and complex. Although lack of in-hospital beds is frequently attributed as the primary reason for crowding, ED's dependencies on other ancillary resources, including imaging, consults, and labs, also contribute to crowding. Using retrospective data associated with imaging, including delays, processing time, and the number of image orders, from a large tier 1 trauma center, we developed a discrete event simulation model to identify the impact of the imaging delays and bundling image orders on patient time in the ED. Results from sensitivity analysis show that reducing the delays associated with imaging and bundling as few as 10% of imaging orders for certain patients can significantly (p-value < 0.05) reduce the time a patient spends in the ED.