EAGER: Improvability Theory for Hospital Emergency Department: A System-Theoretic Method to Reduce Crowding

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This EArly-concept Grant for Exploratory Research (EAGER) award provides funding for the establishment of an analytical theory of improvability for the hospital's emergency department (ED). Specifically, it intends to develop analytical methods that can be used to improve the ED performance through modeling and analysis of patient flow, redistributing limited resources, and through identifying and mitigating bottlenecks. The approach of the research would be based on analytical investigation of the stochastic processes that describe the patient flow in ED. A system-theoretic method, extended from production systems, will be used to model ED as a complex network. The challenge of this research lies in finding appropriate characterization of the complexity in ED, discovering indicators leading to optimal system configurations, and identifying bottlenecks based on real-time data obtained from clinical information system.If successful, the results of this research will establish a novel analytical method to study patient flow in ED. Such a method will enable us to evaluate the ED performance, identify bottlenecks, distribute resources optimally and design operating policies to achieve less crowding and the best quality of care. The successful completion of this research will lead to new methodologies for health care systems research. It will provide a solid foundation for an integrated study of the hospital as a whole and for health care supply chain research. Finally, the results obtained will be applicable not only to health care systems but also to other systems with high variability, service cost and high cost of failure, such as civil emergency response systems, critical supply chains, information networks, etc.