Addressing hospital emergency department (ED) overcrowding is a critical challenge for many healthcare systems worldwide. Many hospitals (including our partner hospital) have been experimenting with innovative patient flow designs to address this challenge. A promising new design is to separate...

This paper examines the effect of temperature on emergency department (ED) visits using administrative data covering 50% of the Hungarian population and 3.52 million ED visits from 2009 to 2017. The results show that ED visit rates increase when average temperatures exceed 10°C, primarily...

Introduction The annual increase in emergency department (ED) visits in Taiwan has led to overcrowding in major hospitals and extended patient stays in the ED. International studies suggest that prolonged ED stays may influence healthcare costs and clinical outcomes for hospitalized patients....

Overcrowded Emergency Departments (EDs) across locations struggle to improve patient experience while dealing with long waits, which erodes medical and financial performance. We investigate whether and how managers could improve patient satisfaction by communicating waits to patients.We conduct...

Das deutsche Gesundheitswesen steht vor einer Vielzahl an Herausforderungen, die sich aus dem demografischen Wandel, den Anforderungen an eine solide Finanzierung und Wirtschaftlichkeit, der Notwendigkeit zur Entbürokratisierung und der Digitalisierung ergeben. Im Mittelpunkt dieses...

The German healthcare system faces urgent challenges, with Minister Karl Lauterbach proposing two major reforms: restructuring hospital financing and overhauling emergency services. While past efforts to reform emergency care have failed, the current crisis - exacerbated by staff shortages and...

We investigate the impact of a large new public hospital on directly observed waiting times in emergency departments of other public hospitals in Nicaragua. Using a difference-indifferences design, we estimate a significant decrease in waiting time by 42% or 10.1 minutes in nearby hospitals...

Purpose This work aims to integrate the concepts generated by a systematic literature review on patient flows in emergency departments (ED) to serve as a basis for developing a generic process model for ED. Design/methodology/approach A systematic literature review was conducted using PRISMA...

Background Forecasting patient arrivals to hospital emergency departments is critical to dealing with surges and to efcient planning, management and functioning of hospital emerency departments. Objective We explore whether past mean values and past observations are useful to forecast daily...

The issue of left before treatment complete (LBTC) patients is common in today’s emergency departments (EDs). This issue represents a medico-legal risk and may cause a revenue loss. Thus, understanding the factors that cause patients to “leave before treatment is complete” is vital to...

Using daily variation in wind power generation in the western portion of Texas, we show that the resulting lower fossil fuel generation in the eastern portion of the state leads to air-quality improvements and, subsequently, to fewer emergency department (ED) visits. Spatially, the impact on...

This paper examines the impact of changes in public long-term care spending on the use of public hospitals among the older population in England, and the cost and quality of this care. Mean per-person long-term care spending fell by 31% between 2009/10 and 2017/18 as part of a large austerity...

We measure whether expert patients - those trained as physicians and nurses - have fewer emergency department visits and the reasons for these differences. Relative to similar patients physicians and nurses had 19.8% and 5.1% fewer ED visits, principally due to fewer avoidable visits. The...

Increases in mental health diagnoses and suicidal behaviors in Emergency Departments are often cited as evidence of an accelerating child mental health crisis. We ask whether trends in ED visits provide an accurate picture of changes in U.S. child mental health. These measures have been...

Inappropriate use of Emergency Departments (EDs) is rising in many OECD countries. In the available literature on avoidable ED visits, only a few paper use a direct measure of avoidable visits, and so far no paper was able to compare the impacts of patient and of health system characteristics on...

In this paper, we examine the impact of information technology (IT)-enabled ridesharing platforms on healthcare demands, specifically at hospitals’ emergency departments (EDs). We consider the rollout of ridesharing platforms over time in distinct locations and analyze changes in Emergency...

Problem definition: Emergency Departments (EDs) impose a complicated service process on patients and accompanying family members (from now: people). ED patients typically encounter long waits, various procedures, and multiple staff members. People lack knowledge about the various elements their...

We provide new insights regarding the finding that Medicaid increased emergency department (ED) use from the Oregon experiment. We find meaningful heterogeneous impacts of Medicaid on ED use using causal machine learning methods. The treatment effect distribution is widely dispersed, and the...

Transportation has been one of the obstacles preventing people from timely and appropriate access to healthcare. Emergency Department (ED), which provides around-the-clock care for illnesses and injuries, including life-threatening ones, is known as the “safety net” of the healthcare system....

Problem definition: Emergency department (ED) delay announcement systems are implemented in many countries. We answer three important questions pertaining to the operations and effectiveness of such systems by studying the public hospital network and ED waiting time (WT) announcement system in...

A substantial literature has studied the influence of malpractice pressure on physician behavior. However, these studies generally focus on malpractice pressure stemming from state laws that govern liability exposure, which may be unknown or not salient to physicians. We test how physicians...

We provide new insights regarding the finding that Medicaid increased emergency department (ED) use from the Oregon experiment. We find meaningful heterogeneous impacts of Medicaid on ED use using causal machine learning methods. The treatment effect distribution is widely dispersed, and the...

We provide new insights into the finding that Medicaid increased emergency department (ED) use from the Oregon experiment. Using nonparametric causal machine learning methods, we find economically meaningful treatment effect heterogeneity in the impact of Medicaid coverage on ED use. The effect...

Background: Acute treatment in emergency case management is required for survival and stabilization of critical patients, followed by a shifting to the relevant medical department for further care. However, for the seriously ill critical patients, i.e., when the care provided by the Emergency...

Problem Definition: Ambulance offload delays (AOD) occur when emergency medical services (EMS) transfer a patient to a busy hospital emergency department (ED), and the patients cannot be immediately transferred from the paramedics to the hospital staff. Relevance: It impacts both the patient and...

We sought to examine whether and how landlord-related forced moves (inclusive of, but not limited to, legal eviction) influenced emergency department (ED) use over time. We used survey data collected between 2017-2019 among 283 low-income participants in New Haven, CT to examine whether...

We provide new insights regarding the finding that Medicaid increased emergency department (ED) use from the Oregon experiment. We find meaningful heterogeneous impacts of Medicaid on ED use using causal machine learning methods. The treatment effect distribution is widely dispersed, and the...

We provide new insights regarding the finding that Medicaid increased emergency department (ED) use from the Oregon experiment. We find meaningful heterogeneous impacts of Medicaid on ED use using causal machine learning methods. The treatment effect distribution is widely dispersed, and the...

A common surge-capacity policy in busy emergency departments (EDs) is to admit patients from the waiting area to hallway beds as the regular beds fill up. Despite its prevalence, the decision on who to place in a hallway bed, and when, is mostly on an ad-hoc basis and there are no well-defined...