Department Blog

The February issue of The American Journal of Emergency Medicine contains an analysis of factors influencing emergency department (ED) performance, based on a national data set compiled by the Emergency Department Benchmarking Alliance. The authors are Laura Pimentel, MD, CPME, and Jon Mark Hirshon, MD, MPH, PhD, and their colleagues from the business schools at City University of New York, the University of Maryland, College Park, and American University. The investigators found that the most important correlate with patients’ departure before completion of treatment was the time between arrival in the ED and the time the patient was first seen by a care provider. The most important factors in the time to first contact with a care provider were physician and nursing staffing levels and ED operations, not patient volume. The title of the article is “Drivers of ED Efficiency: A Statistical and Cluster Analysis of Volume, Staffing, and Operations.