Development of a Multipurpose Dashboard to Monitor the Situation of Emergency Departments

Condition(s) studied

Investigational drug(s) / intervention(s)

no intervention: no intervention

Study summary

An emergency department (ED) is a healthcare service that provides the first clinical assessment and treatment to patients with various acute conditions. These departments, however, are often overwhelmed by the large volume of patients. As a consequence, ED crowding has become a global concern and has been correlated to reduced timeliness and effectiveness of care and increased patient mortality. Concerning input, 20% to 30% of patients are brought to the ED by ambulance; the remaining are self-presenting for the vast majority. Notably, non-urgent conditions characterize a high proportion of all ED visits worldwide, and almost all of these visits involve self-presenting patients. Increasing the awareness of these patients about the mandate of EDs and the real-time situation of the neighboring emergency departments has the potential to reduce the self-presentation of patients with minor, non-urgent conditions. Such patient empowerment can be achieved through a dashboard. Concerning throughput, working in the ED requires emergency physicians and nurses to treat many patients at once while maintaining situational awareness of the surroundings. This is especially true for the head of the department, but it also holds for all physicians. It can be crucial, for example, for physicians to know if there is a bottleneck in the flow of the entire patient care process, such as a particularly high average waiting time for radiology reporting or cardiologic consultation. The availability of this information allows countermeasures to be put in place to regain efficiency. All this can be achieved through dedicated dashboards automatically fed from various information system. In addition, appropriate dashboards also enable health policymakers to monitor specific epidemiological phenomena, such as the emergence of certain infectious diseases, in a timely manner.

Eligibility

Primary outcome measure(s)

• Daschboards — September 2024 - September 2027
  Develop three different control panels for three different end-users, specifically: 1. Dashboard for citizens 2. Dashboard for healthcare providers 3. Dashboard for healthcare policymakers The aim is to extract the needed information from heterogeneous sources and to feed the dashboards according to the needs of the end-users. On the whole, for citizens, the dashboard will be designed to empower them to choose the most appropriate ED to attend or to consider a different, more relevant or more efficient, health service; for healthcare providers, the dashboard will provide a clear and immediate picture of the ED situation in terms of patient flow and workflow; for healthcare policymakers, the dashboard will provide the ability to monitor specific phenomena of interest, such as ED crowding level, possible incidence of pre-specified epidemiological phenomena, availability and timeliness of primary and secondary patient transfers, ambulance offload delays, etc.

Trial sites (2)

More Mario Negri Institute for Pharmacological Research trials in Italy

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