One of my favorite things is to skim through an article and discover a table with great data. We’ve got it here. The data are based on comparative utilization and operational statistics collected by the Emergency Department Benchmarking Alliance from 358 participating hospitals — representing over 14 million emergency department visits. Table 3 is the one that got me excited. Here are the ED metrics included:
- ED Patients / day
- Percent with high CPT acuity rate
- Percent pediatric patients
- Admission rate
- Transfer rate
- EMS arrival rate
- EMS arrival admission rate
- Hospital admission through the ED rate
- Patients per care space
- ECGs / 100 ED visits
- X-ray studies / 100 ED visits
- CT/MRI studies / 100 ED visits
- LBTC (left before treatment completed) rate
- Door-to-physician time
- ED length of stay for admitted patients
- ED length of stay
And it gets even better — these metrics are in 5 different size categories — from the low-volume emergency departments with under 20,000 annual ED visits up to the high-volume with over 80,000.
The findings of this research were that for certain emergency department operational performance measures, bigger (higher volume) is not better.
Source: Welch, S.J., and others. Volume-related differences in emergency department performance. The Joint Commission Journal on Quality and Patient Safety;38(9):395-402, Sept. 2012. Click here for the publisher’s website: http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/jcaho/jcjqs Click here to link to the Emergency Department Benchmarking Alliance website: http://www.edbenchmarking.org/index.php Posted by AHA Resource Center, (312) 422-2050, rc@aha.org
Filed under: Benchmarking, Efficiency, Emergency department, Posted by Kim Garber | Tagged: ED benchmarking, Emergency department benchmarking, Emergency department operational benchmarking, High volume emergency departments, Hospital operational performance measures, Low volume emergency departments |
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