[Legacy Report] IEEE SMC Seminar: Improvability Theory for Hospital Emergency Department: A System-Theoretic Approach to Reduce Crowding

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Hospital emergency departments (ED) across the US are overcrowded. The number of EDs is decreasing, while patient volume is rising. Overcrowding not only results in delayed treatment, long patient waiting time and stay, overburdened working staff, patient elopement and low throughput, it also leads to many other problems, such as medical errors due to overloading, high turnover, diverting of ambulances, etc. In addition, overcrowding also has a significant financial implication. Therefore, analyzing the patient flow in ED to minimize length of stay, improve efficiency and reduce crowding is necessary and important. This talk is devoted to introducing an analytical framework for ED modeling and analysis to improve its efficiency and reduce crowding. In parallel to production systems, we intend to develop an improvability theory for ED operations. Specifically, a system-theoretic approach is proposed to evaluate ED performance in terms of patient outcomes, identify system bottlenecks and redistributing limited resources optimally, and determine optimal workforce configuration and resource allocation to achieve desired performance. This talk will briefly introduce the preliminary results on analyzing care delivery services within the patient rooms, where the patients receive most of the services and spend most of their length of stay. A Markov chain model is introduced to evaluate the patient length of stay and staff utilization with multiple re-entrant care services under limited resources.

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