Joint Commission journal on quality and patient safety / Joint Commission Resources
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Jt Comm J Qual Patient Saf · Apr 2010
Clinical TrialClinical information system and process redesign improves emergency department efficiency.
Fueled by a decade-long increase in emergency department (ED) visits with a concomitant decrease in hospital bed capacity and the number of hospital EDs, ED crowding has reached crisis proportions. Robust information systems and process redesign are two strategies to improve the safety and quality of emergency care. At the ED at the Mount Sinai Medical Center, an urban, tertiary care academic medical center in New York City, elements of departmental work flow were redesigned to streamline patient throughput before implementation of a fully integrated emergency department information system (EDIS) with patient tracking, computerized charting and order entry, and direct access to patient historical data from the hospital data repository. Pre- and postintervention data were analyzed to examine the impact on (ED) efficiency. ⋯ Increasing the clinical information available at the bedside and improving departmental work flow through EDIS implementation and process redesign led to decreased patient throughput times and improved ED efficiency.