The Most Crowded US Hospital Emergency Departments Did Not Adopt Effective Interventions To Improve Flow, 2007-10

Publication Date

2015

Journal Title

Health Aff (Millwood)

Abstract

Emergency department (ED) crowding adversely affects patient care and outcomes. Despite national recommendations to address crowding, it persists in most US EDs today. Using nationally representative data, we evaluated the use of interventions to address crowding in US hospitals in the period 2007-10. We examined the relationship between crowding within an ED itself, measured as longer ED lengths-of-stay, and the number of interventions adopted. In our study period the average number of interventions adopted increased from 5.2 to 6.6, and seven of the seventeen studied interventions saw a significant increase in adoption. In general, more crowded EDs adopted greater numbers of interventions than less crowded EDs. However, in the most crowded quartile of EDs, a large proportion had not adopted effective interventions: 19 percent did not use bedside registration, and 94 percent did not use surgical schedule smoothing. Thus, while adoption of strategies to reduce ED crowding is increasing, many of the nation's most crowded EDs have not adopted proven interventions.

Volume Number

34

Issue Number

12

Pages

2151-9

Document Type

Article

EPub Date

2015/12/09

Status

Faculty

Facility

School of Medicine

Primary Department

Emergency Medicine

PMID

26643637

DOI

10.1377/hlthaff.2015.0603

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