(P2-94) How One Group of Physicians Helped a Busy Emergency Department

Abstract

A pilot admission leadership physician (ALP) program was experimented within a 693-bed, tertiary medical center with a 60-bed emergency department. This trial was intended to investigate whether having a physician triage potential patients would shorten patients' length-of-stay in the emergency department. After a emergency physician evaluated patients, ALP triaged them. The ALP ordered the appropriate bed for the patients if they qualified for the inpatient criteria, choosing among medical, medical telemetry, cardiac telemetry, intermediate care, or intensive care bed. The mean patient door-to-bed order time (time between patients reaching the emergency department to time to bed ordered by ALP) is 330.7 minutes (n = 234, SD = 151.68, 95% CI = 310.21–351.28) with ALP involvement. Compared with the mean door-to-bed order time of 337.8 minutes (n = 827, SD = 149.71, 95%CI = 326.98–348.57) without ALP, ALP shortened the waiting time by 7.09 minutes. During the same period, the door-to-physician time was 41.38 minutes (SD = 38.87 95%CI = 36.38–46.39), compared with 39.52 minutes (SD = 40.32, 95%CI = 36.77–42.27) before ALP. The time for patients waiting in the emergency department for other services such as surgery, psychiatry, and pediatrics also have decreased accordingly. Incorrect medical admissions such as scrambling to get the patient to the intensive care unit right after seeing patients has decreased (data not provided). Identifying physicians as physicians in the emergency department who triage potential admissions also has improved efficiencies within the hospital medicine group and bonding with ER physicians.