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 patients who can be served vertically (e.g., on a regular chair …

Many patients have a choice of a provider for acute care, typically choosing between an Urgent Care facility (UC) or an … Emergency Department of a hospital (ED). This choice is made by a patient who is generally not herself a trained medical … patients, and takes into account the factors that affect the patient. We show that a separating equilibrium, in which all …

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 Hong Kong SAR’s ‘universal’ public healthcare system: (1) How many … patients are aware of (and sensitive to) the ED WT announcements? (2) How sensitive are these patients to the announced WT? (3 …

communicating forecast uncertainty to patients, and implementing this methodology in practice, are also discussed …

satisfaction by communicating waits to patients.We conduct a field experiment at an urban ED. We develop a machine learning … patients with personalized estimated waits with no overestimation (the median), moderate overestimation (70th-percentile), or … high overestimation (90th-percentile). Patients report higher satisfaction when receiving their estimated waits, but the …