title: Comparison of emergency department crowding scores: a discrete-event simulation approach.
abstract: According to American College of Emergency Physicians, emergency department (ED) crowding occurs when the identified need for emergency services exceeds available resources for patient care in the ED, hospital, or both. ED crowding is a widely reported problem and several crowding scores are proposed to quantify crowding using hospital and patient data as inputs for assisting healthcare professionals in anticipating imminent crowding problems. Using data from a large academic hospital in North Carolina, we evaluate three crowding scores, namely, EDWIN, NEDOCS, and READI by assessing strengths and weaknesses of each score, particularly their predictive power. We perform these evaluations by first building a discrete-event simulation model of the ED, validating the results of the simulation model against observations at the ED under consideration, and utilizing the model results to investigate each of the three ED crowding scores under normal operating conditions and under two simulated outbreak scenarios in the ED. We conclude that, for this hospital, both EDWIN and NEDOCS prove to be helpful measures of current ED crowdedness, and both scores demonstrate the ability to anticipate impending crowdedness. Utilizing both EDWIN and NEDOCS scores in combination with the threshold values proposed in this work could provide a real-time alert for clinicians to anticipate impending crowding, which could lead to better preparation and eventually better patient care outcomes.
authors.affiliation: Department of Statistics and Operations Research, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC, USA.
authors.forename: Virginia
authors.initials: V
authors.lastname: Ahalt
authors.affiliation: Department of Statistics and Operations Research, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC, USA. nilay@unc.edu.
authors.forename: Nilay Tanık
authors.initials: NT
authors.lastname: Argon
authors.affiliation: Department of Statistics and Operations Research, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC, USA.
authors.forename: Serhan
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Ziya
authors.affiliation: Department of Emergency Medicine, University of North Carolina School of Medicine, Chapel Hill, NC, USA.|University of North Carolina Health Care, Chapel Hill, NC, USA.
authors.forename: Jeff
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Strickler
authors.affiliation: Department of Emergency Medicine, University of North Carolina School of Medicine, Chapel Hill, NC, USA.
authors.forename: Abhi
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Mehrotra
mesh_terms: D000046:Academic Medical Centers; D001509:Bed Occupancy; D003198:Computer Simulation; D003441:Crowding; D004636:Emergency Service, Hospital / Q000458:organization & administration / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D005544:Forecasting; D006801:Humans; D015233:Models, Statistical; D009657:North Carolina; D010360:Patient Transfer; D013997:Time Factors; D016526:Workload / Q000706:statistics & numerical data
keywords: Discrete-event simulation; Edwin; Emergency department crowding; NEDOCS; Queueing model; READI