Optimizing Emergency Department Throughput

Recognizing that the ideal in health care is presently beyond our immediate grasp, this book focuses on providing health care leaders with the tools they can employ to optimize the performance of emergency departments and thereby improve service to patients, employees, and communities.

Explores the relationships of individual stakeholders and illustrates how information technology can play an important role in improving the performance of the ED. This work also demonstrates how to improve financial performance, specialty services, and billing and collections functions.

Introduction: Description of Current Status of Emergency Departments and Hospitals. Fixing the Front End: Why Would an Emergency Department Medical Director or Nursing Supervisor Wish to Install Emergency Severity Index (ESI) Triage? Process Mapping and Workflow Diagramming in Health Care. What is Lean Six Sigma? An Introduction to Lean and Six Sigma for the Health Care Novice. Using Lean-Six Sigma to Accelerate Emergency Department Results. Queuing Models for Hospital Emergency Departments. The Nursing Perspective and Role in Planning a Simulation Modeling Project: Historical, Experiential, and Future Applications of Complex Adaptive Systems Thinking; with an Emergency Department Case Study. The Physiology of Service Capacity. The Door-to-Doc Toolkit: Planning Emergency Department Capacity for Delivering Safe Care. Forecasting the Demand for Emergency Department Services. Improving Fairness in Nurse Scheduling: Introducing a New Approach Using Auctions and Integer Programming Optimization. Establishing Engineered Nurse Staffing Requirements in the Emergency Department. Patient Safety Organizations: A New Paradigm in Quality Management and Communication Systems in Health Care. Alternative Emergency Care Settings. Appendix A : Case Study-Surviving and Thriving in Emergency Department Chaos. Appendix B. About the Editors. About the Contributors.