A major reason behind crowding in emergency departments (ED) is non-urgent patients' visits to ED. In this paper we investigate how non-urgent ED visits are influenced by patients' imperfect perception of their urgency and their self-interested choice, and we explore interventions that can...

We evaluate the practices of priority, capacity rationing, and ambulance diversion in emergency department management. We consider a two-class non-preemptive priority M/M/c queue where high- and low-priority customers correspond to acute and non-acute patients, respectively; the two classes have...

The emergency department (ED) is an interesting field for operations research (OR) and operations management (OM) researchers. Having timevarying arrivals and heterogeneous patients that need to be treated in consecutive processing steps by several doctors, nurses and other employees, it is a...

Background: Patient demand for emergency medical services continues to rise from all-time highs. ED physicians generally respond to this rising demand by increasing their level of multitasking. Aim: What leads ED physicians to select which patients, and how many patients, they will treat?...

We study the estimation of the probability distribution of individual patient waiting times in an emergency department (ED). Our feature-rich modelling allows for dynamic updating and refinement of waiting time estimates as patient- and ED-specific information (e.g., patient condition, ED...

A policy proposal to address the over-use of emergency departments by the uninsured is expanding public insurance. However, the uninsured are typically not the only recipients of expansions -- crowd-out occurs, and the two groups face radically different price changes. Using the Low Income...