Needy boarding patients in emergency departments: An exploratory case study using discrete-event simulation

This article firstly explores the limited previous research on boarding patients. Secondly, this paper quantitatively demonstrates that needy boarding patients can significantly impact system performance and hence should be accounted for in the analysis and planning of an emergency department through discrete-event simulation. Next, three static priority policies (first-come, first-served and always prioritizing either boarding patients or the other patients) and one dynamic priority policy (using accumulating priorities) are evaluated on various performance measures. We find, for our case study, that system performance is optimized by applying a priority policy that favours patients currently under treatment in the emergency department.
Source: Operations Research for Health Care - Category: Hospital Management Source Type: research