Emergency Room Wait Times: Business Plan
Emergency room wait times are a critical issue in most hospitals. The business plan for reducing ER wait times involves making changes both to the ER's space and its process flow. This paper will provide the objectives, proposed changes, a cost/risk analysis, and a timeline for the changes.
The primary objective of the project is to reduce the average ER wait time at least 25%. Related objectives include more efficient processing, more effective use of ER space, reduced ER crowding, and lower percentage of patients leaving before being seen.
The proposed changes include incorporating lean production techniques to cut time in the ER process, reconfiguring ED space, and using the Rapid Medical Evaluation (RME) Program for getting patients seen more quickly. Each of these changes has been demonstrated effective as findings in the literature review showed.
Lean production techniques such as those used at Toyota can be effectively applied in EDs, as evidenced by the experience of the ED at Hôtel-Dieu Grace Hospital in Ontario (Ng, Vail, Thomas, & Schmidt, 2010, p. 50). As this hospital did, our hospital will improve its wait times without adding any beds, by implementing Toyota's value-stream mapping and just-in-time delivery techniques along with a reorganization of the ER to reduce wasted time (Ng, Vail, Thomas, & Schmidt, 2010, p. 50). Value-stream mapping will be done by mapping out the existing process flow for incoming ER patients with a view toward locating the bottlenecks and redesigning the flow to eliminate them (Ng, Vail, Thomas, & Schmidt, 2010, p. 52). Waste in the process will be eliminated. The seven waste areas that Hôtel-Dieu Grace Hospital found included overproduction (creating more work than needed), motion (unnecessary extra steps), waiting (lag time between ste
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