Session | ||
MB2- HC2: Emergency departments 2
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Presentations | ||
Share or hide emergency department queue-lengths to reduce congestion? Singapore University of Technology and Design, Singapore We present a queueing games framework to investigate how sharing of real-time queue-length information at emergency department (ED), where urgent patients receive priority over nonurgent patients, influences nonurgent patients' decision to enter or balk the ED queue, and how it affects the overall social welfare of patients who visit the ED. We show that under certain conditions, it may be better to partially reveal ED queue-length information rather than making ED queues completely transparent. Providing wait time information to ED patients: effects on satisfaction and reneging 1UC San Diego, United States of America; 2Stanford University, United States of America In a field experiment in an Emergency Department, we found that providing delay information improves patients' waiting satisfaction by 81%, and decreases their likelihood of reneging by 14%. The announced delay acts as a reference point against which the patients compare the actual delay. Following Prospect Theory, we found that patients are loss-averse that the likelihood of LWBS is much lower when they wait a shorter time than announced than when they wait a longer time than announced. Models of the impact of triage nurse standing orders on emergency department length of stay 1University of Rochester, United States of America; 2Alberta School of Business, University of Alberta, Canada Standing orders allow triage nurses in EDs to order tests for certain medical conditions before the patient sees a physician, which could reduce the patient’s LOS. Medical literature documents the use of standing orders decreasing average ED LOS for the patient subject to standing orders. We model operational impact of standing orders and introduce a threshold based congestion-sensitive policy which performs well wrt overall average ED LOS across a wide range of scenarios. |