Reducing emergency department overcrowding: five patient buffer concepts in comparison

  • Authors:
  • Erik M. W. Kolb;Sebastian Schoening;Jordan Peck;Taesik Lee

  • Affiliations:
  • RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, Germany;MAG Europe GmbH, Goeppingen, Germany;Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA;Complex System Design Lab, Daejeon, Republic of Korea

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 40th Conference on Winter Simulation
  • Year:
  • 2008

Quantified Score

Hi-index 0.00

Visualization

Abstract

Emergency Department (ED) overcrowding is a common medical care issue in the United States and other developed nations. One major cause of ED crowding are holding patients waiting in the Emergency Room (ER) for inpatient unit admission where they block critical ED resources. With input data from a hospital in Massachusetts/USA, we tested five patient buffer concepts which aim at relieving pressure of the ER. The buffers are also assumed to improve patient and staff satisfaction through their design tailored to needs in patient flow. To ensure patients safety, we performed tests with discrete event simulation in which we discovered 'triage to bed time' reductions of up to 22% and 'diversion hour' decreases of up to 24%. All buffers managed to run with significantly less resources than the ER. Our findings have a potential impact on hospital process flow due to clear results which offer substantial improvement of hospital organization.