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Impact of Rapid Medical Evaluation on Patient Flow in an Urban Emergency Department

  • Patient Facing Systems
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Abstract

Rapid Medical Evaluation (RME) is a new Emergency Department (ED) process that initiates testing while patients are in the Waiting Room. Primary goal of this study is to assess the effectiveness of RME pathway on the patient flow through the ED. This was a retrospective, single site, cohort study of patients presenting to the ED 12 months before (PRE group) and 12 months after (POST group) RME implementation. The POST group was divided into those that underwent RME and those managed using standard care pathway (SCP). Data was collected from Electronic Health Record (EHR) database using SQL and consisted of time stamp data for discrete ED patient events. The following metrics were calculated for all ED encounters: Active ED Room Time, Boarding Time, Total ED Room Time, Total ED Time, and Door-to-Provider Time. Patients undergoing RME on average spent 90-min less in ED Treatment Room compared to SCP group and were evaluated by a provider 151 min earlier than if they had waited for an available ED Treatment Room. Implementation of RME helped reduce time patients spend in ED Treatment Room, improved patient throughput, and decreased Door-to-Provider time during the busiest times in the ED.

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Availability of data and material

Much of the data has Personal Health Information so cannot share the data.

Code availability

Code is specific to the analyzed data, and because the data contains Personal Health Information, it is not available for sharing.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Emergency Medicine, University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, Dallas, TX, USA

    Jakub Furmaga & Samuel A. McDonald

  2. Clinical Informatics Center, University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, Dallas, TX, USA

    Samuel A. McDonald

Authors
  1. Jakub Furmaga
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  2. Samuel A. McDonald
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Contributions

JF conceived the study, designed the trial, and obtained IRB approval. SAM constructed SQL algorithm to obtain the necessary data. JF did data cleaning, analysis, and graphing. JF drafted the manuscript and all authors contributed substantially to its revisions. JF takes responsibility for the paper as a whole.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Jakub Furmaga.

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Ethics approval

Study was deemed exempt by the local Institutional Review Board (IRB).

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Neither author has any conflict of interest.

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This article is part of the Topical Collection on Patient Facing Systems.

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Furmaga, J., McDonald, S.A. Impact of Rapid Medical Evaluation on Patient Flow in an Urban Emergency Department. J Med Syst 45, 63 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10916-021-01741-8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10916-021-01741-8

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