1. This document describes how operations research (OR) models can help reduce delays in healthcare. It identifies three major sources of delays: emergency department delays, delays for medical appointments, and delays for nursing care.
2. Within emergency department delays, it notes long wait times to see physicians and delays in getting inpatient beds once admitted. For medical appointments, it describes waits of several weeks on average to see primary care physicians. Delays for nursing care can compromise patient safety due to insufficient staffing levels.
3. It argues that healthcare delays remain prevalent because they have not been well measured or reported, hospitals face cost pressures to maximize occupancy, and national shortages of healthcare professionals exacerbate delays. OR models have
Medical Students in Global Neurosurgery: Rationale and RoleAhmad Ozair
Approximately 5 million essential neurosurgical cases are unmet each year, all in low- and middle-income countries (1). After the Lancet Commission on Global Surgery described the absence of global surgery from global health discourse in January 2014 (2), the field of neurosurgery quickly recognized the importance of increasing equity in care globally (3-5). Although existing initiatives in global neurosurgery have focused on neurosurgeons and trainees, medical students represent a promising group for sustainable long-term engagement. We characterize why medical students are fundamental to success, outline the importance of incorporating medical students, and delineate how to increase medical student interest and participation in global neurosurgery.
Medical Students in Global Neurosurgery: Rationale and RoleAhmad Ozair
Approximately 5 million essential neurosurgical cases are unmet each year, all in low- and middle-income countries (1). After the Lancet Commission on Global Surgery described the absence of global surgery from global health discourse in January 2014 (2), the field of neurosurgery quickly recognized the importance of increasing equity in care globally (3-5). Although existing initiatives in global neurosurgery have focused on neurosurgeons and trainees, medical students represent a promising group for sustainable long-term engagement. We characterize why medical students are fundamental to success, outline the importance of incorporating medical students, and delineate how to increase medical student interest and participation in global neurosurgery.
Stroke is a medical emergency, with a mortality rate higher than most forms of cancer. It is the second leading cause of death in developed countries and is the most common cause of serious, long-term disability in adults. The incidence of stroke is increasing with the aging of populations and hence there is a major challenge to health planners.
Evidence-based advances in acute stroke have included proof of the benefit of organized care in stroke units, modern brain imaging, and thrombolytic therapy, the modest benefit of acute aspirin in ischemic stroke clearly, a lack of awareness of the common symptoms of stroke remains a major educational challenge, and the urgency of stroke treatment is still poorly appreciated. Despite the proven benefit of stroke units, the majority of patients in most countries cannot access specialized stroke care.
The article focuses on current treatment guidelines and new therapeutic prospects, emphasizing the importance of early intervention and the need for a multidisciplinary approach to the management of stroke patients.
The Evaluation of Time Performance in the Emergency Response Center in Kerman...Emergency Live
The Evaluation of Time Performance in the Emergency Response
Center to Provide Pre-Hospital Emergency Services in Kermanshah
http://www.ccsenet.org/journal/index.php/gjhs/article/view/38288
IMPACT OF HEALTH INFORMATICS TECHNOLOGY ON THE IMPLEMENTATION OF A MODIFIED E...hiij
The Modified Early Warning System (MEWS) is based on a patient score that helps the medical team monitor patients to identify a patient that may be experiencing a sudden decline in care. This study consists of a detailed review of clinical data and patient outcomes to assess impact of technology and patient care.There are a total of thirteen hospitals included in this review. These facilities have implemented vitals capture and the MEWS scoring system.
Geriatric Oncology
1. Relationship between aging and cancer
2. Constructs of frailty and multimorbidity
3. Evidence for geriatric assessment in older adults living with cancer
Impaled roadside guardrail in the neck: Case of a failed motorcycle stuntAhmad Ozair
Trauma is currently the leading cause of death in the age group 15 to 44 years globally, with road trauma now representing the sixth leading cause of death worldwide. We present a case of a young male, who was brought to the apex trauma centre of the province with a metallic roadside guardrail impaled in his neck up to his oral cavity, which had to be cut to transport him to the hospital. A meticulous local exploration resulted in the successful removal of the spiked guardrail, with no damage to critical structures. We discuss the paradigm changes in and the expertise required for the management of such penetrating neck injuries (PNIs). For family physicians, this case represents one of the wide variety of cases they will be called to help upon and administer prehospital care. Thus, utilization of principles of basic life support, recognition of the severity of road trauma cases, and ensuring urgency of referral by general practitioners are all critical.
12
Capstone Project
Olivia Timmons
Department of Nursing. St. Johns River State College
NUR 4949: Nursing Capstone
Dr. C. Z. Velasco
November 14, 2021
Capstone Project
There is a saying that states one can only learn through doing it, practically and physically. It is the explanation as to why it is very important to implement the skills acquired in theory into practice to ascertain one’s competence. This is even more crucial in the medical field as they have no choice but just to be perfect at what they are doing, the only secret is through practice. Practicums connect the two worlds of theory and classwork, thus breaking the monotony alongside connecting what was taught in class with what happens in the field. They are important as apart from sharpening the student’s skills, they also open a window of opportunity and build up connections that will come in handy for the student later on. They will feel the experience and the pressure that comes with it thus preparing themselves accordingly.
Statement of the Problem
Timing is essential in the nursing field and the Emergency Room is notorious for its long wait times. The goal of a clinical laboratory is to deliver medically useful results for patients on a timely basis. This goal can be hindered by the new paradigm of the modern laboratory – “do more with less" (Lopez, 2020). When implementing new care models for patients, the patient perspective is critical. The objective of this study was to describe and develop an understanding of the information needs of patients in the ED waiting room concerning ED wait time notification (Calder, 2021). As a patient arrives at the ER waiting area, it's critical to have lab results for the provider to evaluate. I can give you an example of a patient that waited in the waiting room for over 3 hours, no labs were completed because they were waiting for the patient to go back into a room. The patient was suffering from a heart attack and his troponins were elevated and no one knew until 3 hours later. If POC labs were done on all patients as soon as they arrived, mistakes like these can be avoided. Completed POC blood can cut the wait times in half and the laboratory also won't be backed up on resulting lab specimens.
PICOT Question
Question: Is there a significant decrease in Emergency Department patient length of stay (LOS) for those whose blood was analyzed using POC testing versus those whose blood was analyzed using laboratory testing?
· P-Population= emergency room patients
· I-Intervention or Exposure= POC testing of blood specimens
· C-Comparison= Laboratory blood specimens
· O-Outcome= Decrease patient stay in the emergency room
· T-Time = N/A
History of the Issue
The length of patient stay in the emergency department (ED) is an issue that not only increases the severity of illnesses but also reduces the quality of patient care. Serious health conditions including diabetes and hypertension can worsen while patients are ...
12
Capstone Project
Olivia Timmons
Department of Nursing. St. Johns River State College
NUR 4949: Nursing Capstone
Dr. C. Z. Velasco
November 14, 2021
Capstone Project
There is a saying that states one can only learn through doing it, practically and physically. It is the explanation as to why it is very important to implement the skills acquired in theory into practice to ascertain one’s competence. This is even more crucial in the medical field as they have no choice but just to be perfect at what they are doing, the only secret is through practice. Practicums connect the two worlds of theory and classwork, thus breaking the monotony alongside connecting what was taught in class with what happens in the field. They are important as apart from sharpening the student’s skills, they also open a window of opportunity and build up connections that will come in handy for the student later on. They will feel the experience and the pressure that comes with it thus preparing themselves accordingly.
Statement of the Problem
Timing is essential in the nursing field and the Emergency Room is notorious for its long wait times. The goal of a clinical laboratory is to deliver medically useful results for patients on a timely basis. This goal can be hindered by the new paradigm of the modern laboratory – “do more with less" (Lopez, 2020). When implementing new care models for patients, the patient perspective is critical. The objective of this study was to describe and develop an understanding of the information needs of patients in the ED waiting room concerning ED wait time notification (Calder, 2021). As a patient arrives at the ER waiting area, it's critical to have lab results for the provider to evaluate. I can give you an example of a patient that waited in the waiting room for over 3 hours, no labs were completed because they were waiting for the patient to go back into a room. The patient was suffering from a heart attack and his troponins were elevated and no one knew until 3 hours later. If POC labs were done on all patients as soon as they arrived, mistakes like these can be avoided. Completed POC blood can cut the wait times in half and the laboratory also won't be backed up on resulting lab specimens.
PICOT Question
Question: Is there a significant decrease in Emergency Department patient length of stay (LOS) for those whose blood was analyzed using POC testing versus those whose blood was analyzed using laboratory testing?
· P-Population= emergency room patients
· I-Intervention or Exposure= POC testing of blood specimens
· C-Comparison= Laboratory blood specimens
· O-Outcome= Decrease patient stay in the emergency room
· T-Time = N/A
History of the Issue
The length of patient stay in the emergency department (ED) is an issue that not only increases the severity of illnesses but also reduces the quality of patient care. Serious health conditions including diabetes and hypertension can worsen while patients are ...
Whitepaper: Hospital Operations Management reduces wait states and replaces d...GE Software
No Wait States … in pursuit of the frictionless patient experience. Electronic health records have fallen short. Patients continue to wait. Costs remain high. Why focusing on operational management can help hospitals make things right … starting now.
The number of missed appointments in healthcare institutions in Nigeria caused problems, hence the need
for integrated healthcare system to intervene and provide seamless care for patients. Appointment
scheduling system lies at the intersection of providing efficiency and timely access to health services. This
research presents an online National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS) Outpatient Medical Appointment
Booking System where NHIS patients can access and view any available personnel or doctor schedule in
order to book an appointment with the corresponding time as specified by the available doctor. The system
was developed using PhP, macromedia dreamweaver, apache and MYSQL. This is to ensure that the
application is robust, cheap and is able to run on different platforms. The system provides the platform to
facilitate the booking and management of patients’ appointment bookings. Patients can also view their
appointment reports. It also provides the healthcare workers an easy access to manage patients’
appointments and to generate relevant reports.
Stroke is a medical emergency, with a mortality rate higher than most forms of cancer. It is the second leading cause of death in developed countries and is the most common cause of serious, long-term disability in adults. The incidence of stroke is increasing with the aging of populations and hence there is a major challenge to health planners.
Evidence-based advances in acute stroke have included proof of the benefit of organized care in stroke units, modern brain imaging, and thrombolytic therapy, the modest benefit of acute aspirin in ischemic stroke clearly, a lack of awareness of the common symptoms of stroke remains a major educational challenge, and the urgency of stroke treatment is still poorly appreciated. Despite the proven benefit of stroke units, the majority of patients in most countries cannot access specialized stroke care.
The article focuses on current treatment guidelines and new therapeutic prospects, emphasizing the importance of early intervention and the need for a multidisciplinary approach to the management of stroke patients.
The Evaluation of Time Performance in the Emergency Response Center in Kerman...Emergency Live
The Evaluation of Time Performance in the Emergency Response
Center to Provide Pre-Hospital Emergency Services in Kermanshah
http://www.ccsenet.org/journal/index.php/gjhs/article/view/38288
IMPACT OF HEALTH INFORMATICS TECHNOLOGY ON THE IMPLEMENTATION OF A MODIFIED E...hiij
The Modified Early Warning System (MEWS) is based on a patient score that helps the medical team monitor patients to identify a patient that may be experiencing a sudden decline in care. This study consists of a detailed review of clinical data and patient outcomes to assess impact of technology and patient care.There are a total of thirteen hospitals included in this review. These facilities have implemented vitals capture and the MEWS scoring system.
Geriatric Oncology
1. Relationship between aging and cancer
2. Constructs of frailty and multimorbidity
3. Evidence for geriatric assessment in older adults living with cancer
Impaled roadside guardrail in the neck: Case of a failed motorcycle stuntAhmad Ozair
Trauma is currently the leading cause of death in the age group 15 to 44 years globally, with road trauma now representing the sixth leading cause of death worldwide. We present a case of a young male, who was brought to the apex trauma centre of the province with a metallic roadside guardrail impaled in his neck up to his oral cavity, which had to be cut to transport him to the hospital. A meticulous local exploration resulted in the successful removal of the spiked guardrail, with no damage to critical structures. We discuss the paradigm changes in and the expertise required for the management of such penetrating neck injuries (PNIs). For family physicians, this case represents one of the wide variety of cases they will be called to help upon and administer prehospital care. Thus, utilization of principles of basic life support, recognition of the severity of road trauma cases, and ensuring urgency of referral by general practitioners are all critical.
12
Capstone Project
Olivia Timmons
Department of Nursing. St. Johns River State College
NUR 4949: Nursing Capstone
Dr. C. Z. Velasco
November 14, 2021
Capstone Project
There is a saying that states one can only learn through doing it, practically and physically. It is the explanation as to why it is very important to implement the skills acquired in theory into practice to ascertain one’s competence. This is even more crucial in the medical field as they have no choice but just to be perfect at what they are doing, the only secret is through practice. Practicums connect the two worlds of theory and classwork, thus breaking the monotony alongside connecting what was taught in class with what happens in the field. They are important as apart from sharpening the student’s skills, they also open a window of opportunity and build up connections that will come in handy for the student later on. They will feel the experience and the pressure that comes with it thus preparing themselves accordingly.
Statement of the Problem
Timing is essential in the nursing field and the Emergency Room is notorious for its long wait times. The goal of a clinical laboratory is to deliver medically useful results for patients on a timely basis. This goal can be hindered by the new paradigm of the modern laboratory – “do more with less" (Lopez, 2020). When implementing new care models for patients, the patient perspective is critical. The objective of this study was to describe and develop an understanding of the information needs of patients in the ED waiting room concerning ED wait time notification (Calder, 2021). As a patient arrives at the ER waiting area, it's critical to have lab results for the provider to evaluate. I can give you an example of a patient that waited in the waiting room for over 3 hours, no labs were completed because they were waiting for the patient to go back into a room. The patient was suffering from a heart attack and his troponins were elevated and no one knew until 3 hours later. If POC labs were done on all patients as soon as they arrived, mistakes like these can be avoided. Completed POC blood can cut the wait times in half and the laboratory also won't be backed up on resulting lab specimens.
PICOT Question
Question: Is there a significant decrease in Emergency Department patient length of stay (LOS) for those whose blood was analyzed using POC testing versus those whose blood was analyzed using laboratory testing?
· P-Population= emergency room patients
· I-Intervention or Exposure= POC testing of blood specimens
· C-Comparison= Laboratory blood specimens
· O-Outcome= Decrease patient stay in the emergency room
· T-Time = N/A
History of the Issue
The length of patient stay in the emergency department (ED) is an issue that not only increases the severity of illnesses but also reduces the quality of patient care. Serious health conditions including diabetes and hypertension can worsen while patients are ...
12
Capstone Project
Olivia Timmons
Department of Nursing. St. Johns River State College
NUR 4949: Nursing Capstone
Dr. C. Z. Velasco
November 14, 2021
Capstone Project
There is a saying that states one can only learn through doing it, practically and physically. It is the explanation as to why it is very important to implement the skills acquired in theory into practice to ascertain one’s competence. This is even more crucial in the medical field as they have no choice but just to be perfect at what they are doing, the only secret is through practice. Practicums connect the two worlds of theory and classwork, thus breaking the monotony alongside connecting what was taught in class with what happens in the field. They are important as apart from sharpening the student’s skills, they also open a window of opportunity and build up connections that will come in handy for the student later on. They will feel the experience and the pressure that comes with it thus preparing themselves accordingly.
Statement of the Problem
Timing is essential in the nursing field and the Emergency Room is notorious for its long wait times. The goal of a clinical laboratory is to deliver medically useful results for patients on a timely basis. This goal can be hindered by the new paradigm of the modern laboratory – “do more with less" (Lopez, 2020). When implementing new care models for patients, the patient perspective is critical. The objective of this study was to describe and develop an understanding of the information needs of patients in the ED waiting room concerning ED wait time notification (Calder, 2021). As a patient arrives at the ER waiting area, it's critical to have lab results for the provider to evaluate. I can give you an example of a patient that waited in the waiting room for over 3 hours, no labs were completed because they were waiting for the patient to go back into a room. The patient was suffering from a heart attack and his troponins were elevated and no one knew until 3 hours later. If POC labs were done on all patients as soon as they arrived, mistakes like these can be avoided. Completed POC blood can cut the wait times in half and the laboratory also won't be backed up on resulting lab specimens.
PICOT Question
Question: Is there a significant decrease in Emergency Department patient length of stay (LOS) for those whose blood was analyzed using POC testing versus those whose blood was analyzed using laboratory testing?
· P-Population= emergency room patients
· I-Intervention or Exposure= POC testing of blood specimens
· C-Comparison= Laboratory blood specimens
· O-Outcome= Decrease patient stay in the emergency room
· T-Time = N/A
History of the Issue
The length of patient stay in the emergency department (ED) is an issue that not only increases the severity of illnesses but also reduces the quality of patient care. Serious health conditions including diabetes and hypertension can worsen while patients are ...
Whitepaper: Hospital Operations Management reduces wait states and replaces d...GE Software
No Wait States … in pursuit of the frictionless patient experience. Electronic health records have fallen short. Patients continue to wait. Costs remain high. Why focusing on operational management can help hospitals make things right … starting now.
The number of missed appointments in healthcare institutions in Nigeria caused problems, hence the need
for integrated healthcare system to intervene and provide seamless care for patients. Appointment
scheduling system lies at the intersection of providing efficiency and timely access to health services. This
research presents an online National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS) Outpatient Medical Appointment
Booking System where NHIS patients can access and view any available personnel or doctor schedule in
order to book an appointment with the corresponding time as specified by the available doctor. The system
was developed using PhP, macromedia dreamweaver, apache and MYSQL. This is to ensure that the
application is robust, cheap and is able to run on different platforms. The system provides the platform to
facilitate the booking and management of patients’ appointment bookings. Patients can also view their
appointment reports. It also provides the healthcare workers an easy access to manage patients’
appointments and to generate relevant reports.
Background: Cardiac catheterization is considered as the gold standard practice for the recognition and diagnosis coronary heart disease. The hazard physically and emotionally occurs from this procedure can disturb the patient’s perception of their health. Nursing care is vital in survival and avoids the patients from post cardiac catheterization problems. So the competence of nurses about knowledge and practice regarding patient care after cardiac catheterization is very crucial. Aims: the aim of this study to investigate the effect of creating learning guideline for nurses caring for patients safety undergoing cardiac catheterization. Methods: A quasi experimental research design was conducted. The study was conducted at the Cardiac Catheterization intensive care, cardiac care and emergency units at general Port Said hospital in Port Said city – Egypt. Subjects: A purposive sample of 51 nurses was working in those departments. Tools: two tools were utilized. Tool I: consisted of the following: Part 1: Socio-demographic data of the nurses. Part II: nurses’ knowledge about cardiac catheterization. Tool II: Nursing care after cardiac catheterization to providing patient safety. Results: The study revealed that the majority of nurses have a highly satisfactory level of knowledge and performance regarding patient safety on cardiac catheterization post implementation the learning guideline than pre learning guideline. It was reflected positive correlation between nurses qualification, experience and knowledge regarding patient’s safety at post learning guideline with significant difference regarding experience. While, there was a strong positive correlation between the performance of studied nurses and their qualification regarding the post learning guideline implementation with significant. Finally, positive correlation between performance and knowledge regarding patient safety at post learning guideline implementation. Conclusion: it can be concluded that learning guideline considerably improved the nurses’ level of knowledge and performance regarding Caring For Patients Safety Undergoing Cardiac Catheterization. Overall knowledge score between pre learning guideline and post learning guideline was found to be significant. While, total performance score between pre learning guideline and post learning guideline was found to be not significant. Therefore, the learning guidelines are recommended for educating these nurses to promote knowledge and performance regarding patient safety to decrease hazards following cardiac catheterization.
Assignment 1Part 1 Defining the ProblemProblem Identification.docxtrippettjettie
Assignment 1
Part 1: Defining the Problem
Problem Identification
According to Ludwick and Doucette (2009), one of the primary issues in healthcare is the reduced standard of patient care due to the continued non-integration of technology in medical-based facilities. The result is a poor entry of patient data, coupled with a system that cannot be relied upon in the long term. In this context, Black et al. (2011) are of the opinion that it is mandatory for all healthcare facilities to incorporate electronic health records systems and shift from the use of manual-based recording strategies.
Comment by Author: Use all of participating authors the first time listing
Problem Statement
The continued utilization of manual health-based recording system in the contemporary society leads to reduced efficiency. It also negatively affects the overall outcome of healthcare delivery at the expense of the patient.
Problem Description
The continued use of paper-based records in the modern society is inefficient as compared to hospices that use electronic-based recording system. First, the use of the latter focuses on patient-centered care whereby there it leads to reduced repetition of tests, as there is no scattering of test results in various hospitals. In addition, the paper-based recording system is redundant as the access to a patient’s records by a medical health provider is limited by the location of the doctor as well as the time they can access the hospital (Black et al. 2011). However, the latter is not limited by the mentioned entities since data can be sent electronically at any time and place to the doctor. The problem is directly related to my discipline since patients that undergo recording of their personal information through the manual-based recording system are prone to medical errors. According to Ludwick and Doucette (2009), such errors may involve poor drug administration, especially if a patient may prove allergic to various subscribedprescribed medications. Besides, the electronic-based records will result in increased monitoring of a patient, which leads to faster healthcare delivery, which is the objective of studying my discipline.
Purpose Statement
The reduced efficiency coupled with the adverse outcome caused by paper-based recording systems will be obliterated upon the incorporation of the electronic-based recording system. The objective related to the implementation of the project is increased efficiency and improved quality of healthcare delivery to the patients.
Part 2: Defining a Searchable, Answerable Question:
Population/Patient Problem:
1. What are the efficiency rates concerning number of patients that are bound to benefit from the incorporation of the electronic-based records?
Comment by Author: Needs to clarify what the rates are referring? Efficiency of what?
2. Does the electronic health recording provide any unique advantages over the manual recording system regarding the health status, of a patient?
Interventio ...
Unit 1Emergency Department Overcrowding Due to L.docxwillcoxjanay
Unit 1
Emergency Department Overcrowding Due to Lack of Access to Primary Care
Teresa Cochran
November 12, 2015
Emergency Department Overcrowding Due to Lack of Access to Primary Care
Emergency Department overcrowding related to patients seeking care for non-emergent conditions is an increasing concern for hospitals across the country. In rural areas, this issue is of concern not only for patient care but also has an impact economically on hospital financial viability.
Current Situation
Emergency Departments are designed to provide expedient care for individuals with emergent, life-threatening situations. However, in the current state, emergency departments are increasingly serving as a source of providing primary care. The resulting inappropriate use of the emergency department for non-emergent visits has been shown to increases cost, impact patient safety and quality.
Healthcare organizations must find and development innovative methods to provide quality patient care while maintaining low cost and maximum efficiencies. While demand for Emergency Services grows in part due to an aging population, the volume also has grown due to lack of primary care physicians and patient preference. The financial pressures faced by hospitals due to reductions in reimbursement necessitate a restructuring of the standard model of healthcare care delivery.
Problem Statement
As the population continues to grow emergency departments will continue to see not only acute illness but more chronic illness. It is essential for health care systems to continue in developing new and innovative means related to optimization of care delivery. Specifically this will identify factors that affect overutilization of the emergency department by individuals that are more appropriately treated in the primary care setting. Therefore, the increasing use of emergency departments will impact overall patient care due to lack of continuity that is provided in the primary care setting for chronic illness.
Research Objective
This research proposal will evaluate the feasibility of incorporating a medical home into the emergency department setting, therefore, reducing overcrowding in the Emergency Department. This increased access to primary care will ultimately increase access to quality care in the most appropriate cost-effective setting
Research Question
The intended purpose of this research proposal will examine the concept volume and acuity of patients seen in the Emergency Department. The following questions will be addressed. What measures can be implemented to reduce the overutilization of the ED yet offer the appropriate level of care for the patient? What barriers are associated with accessing sustained primary care?
Hypothesis
In order to improve outcomes, healthcare organizations must evaluate the feasibility of healthcare redesign related to the delivery of care. By restructuring how and where care is delivered will reduce the number of non-eme ...
2Running Head Nursing Informatics on Patient Outcomes 2Nurs.docxlorainedeserre
2
Running Head: Nursing Informatics on Patient Outcomes
2
Nursing Informatics on Patient Outcomes
The Impact of Nursing Informatics on Patient Outcomes and Patient Care Efficiencies
Nicole L Rosser
Walden University
NURS 6051
June 16, 2019
The Impact of Nursing Informatics on Patient Outcomes and Patient Care Efficiencies
According to Agha (2014) “Information technology has been linked to productivity growth in a wide variety of sectors, and health information technology (HIT) is a leading example of an innovation with the potential to transform industry-wide productivity.” Due to evidence-based practice research with informatics in the healthcare setting has proven to be a well-known, much needed entity. Studies have shown the efficiency of technology in healthcare improved documentation for healthcare providers and nurses. Healthcare technology also provides a means for organizations to communicate with each other without even picking up a phone. Another, aspect of technology in healthcare allows the healthcare team to monitor trends and changes in a patient’s status. For example, a critical patient on a cardiac monitor would alarm to quickly notify the nurse that a critical change has occurred for timely interventions to take place. With stroke being the fifth leading cause of death in the U.S. adopting Stroke Telemedicine into practice would be innovative for any organization. Much research has shown that healthcare facilities remain untrained and unprepared for stroke care and management.
Proposed Project
The project proposed to better equip my organization with treating stroke patients is Telestroke. According to the Mayo Clinic (2019) “In telestroke, also called stroke telemedicine, doctors who have advanced training in treating strokes can use technology to treat people who have had strokes in another location.” The use of this system is said to reduce wait time for an onsite neurologist and to increase one’s chances of receiving prompt treatment for a desirable outcome. This service will also save money by preventing Medicare and Medicaid from having to pay rehabilitation cost due to disabilities and long-term care. Telestroke will also provide efficient time for Tissue Plasminogen Activator (tPA). The drug tPA is an FDA-approved medication also known as a clot buster use in treating strokes to dissolve that which may be causing an ischemic stroke. However, it is contraindicated with a hemorrhagic stroke which may cause an excessive amount of bleeding if given due to the broken vessels that may have caused the stroke. This service has brought together neurologist and emergency physicians that feel using Telestroke will reduce geographical disparities and prevent increased cost from misuse of other medical facilities.
Stakeholder Impacted by This Project
One of the main stakeholdersthat would be affected in this project would be Dr. Buehler who is the regional director of all the Urgent Cares and Clinical Decision- ...
Reducing Stroke Readmissions in Acute Care Setting.docxdanas19
Reducing Stroke Readmissions in Acute Care Setting
Contents
Introduction: 2
Objective of the study: 3
Readmission Factors: 3
Statins: 3
Long term care: 4
Demographics: 4
Personal Reflections: 4
Events: 4
Empirical Evidence: 6
Interventions for discharged patients: 6
TRACS: 7
COMPASS: 7
MISTT: 8
Clinical requirement: 8
Timeline: 8
Collaboration with the preceptor: 8
Proposed evaluative criteria: 9
Evaluative criteria discussed: 9
Conclusion: 9
Bibliography 10
Introduction:
Stroke refers to a cardiovascular disease which has been one of the leading reasons for deaths and long term disability. A stroke is an abrupt onset of a neurological deficit led by a vascular rupture or blockage that reduces the blood flow to brain. Subsequently, causing death to the tissue in the brain region if interruption of the blood flow persists. The indications of stroke vary, but may include the loss of function to one side of the body, the inability to speak or talk, and reduced vision or severe headache (Poston, 2018).
Issue: Discovery Research
Over time, the financial penalties on readmissions to the hospital have been taking place, which is promoting hospitals to take measures to reduce the instance of readmissions. A variety of interventions are taking place on different levels to ensure that pre and post discharge care is in place to avoid readmissions. The efficacy of interventions is dependent on the variety of components. Single component interventions are least effective and tend to have no effect on readmissions to the hospitals. Patients that are discharged to post-acute care accommodations are subjected to multi-component interventions and readmissions have dropped drastically. These interventions work through communication, advanced planning of care, and training to tackle simple medical issues that might cause readmissions. The availability of risk stratification methods have made it easier for the hospitals to give more care and attention to the patients that are more likely to get readmitted. Home based services are provided to ensure proper medical care for the patients.
This capstone project attempts to discuss the factors causing the readmissions of stroke patients to the hospitals. The past 20 years have proven to be important in acute and inpatient stroke care however, quality of post-acute care varies specially for the patients that are discharged to home. (Condon, Lycan, & Duncan, 2016). Different reasons for stroke readmissions are to be examined in this capstone project. Expected Outcomes: Discovery Research
This project aims to take into account the reasons of stroke and readmissions after being treated for stroke. Stroke is the second primary reason of readmissions in the hospital. Major readmissions comprise of elderly people. 20-70% people who survive stroke are readmitted in the first year of their treatment (Bravata, Ho, Meehan, & Brass, 2006). Poor health conditions and high treatment costs both account for the l.
The world of search engine optimization (SEO) is buzzing with discussions after Google confirmed that around 2,500 leaked internal documents related to its Search feature are indeed authentic. The revelation has sparked significant concerns within the SEO community. The leaked documents were initially reported by SEO experts Rand Fishkin and Mike King, igniting widespread analysis and discourse. For More Info:- https://news.arihantwebtech.com/search-disrupted-googles-leaked-documents-rock-the-seo-world/
3.0 Project 2_ Developing My Brand Identity Kit.pptxtanyjahb
A personal brand exploration presentation summarizes an individual's unique qualities and goals, covering strengths, values, passions, and target audience. It helps individuals understand what makes them stand out, their desired image, and how they aim to achieve it.
Discover the innovative and creative projects that highlight my journey throu...dylandmeas
Discover the innovative and creative projects that highlight my journey through Full Sail University. Below, you’ll find a collection of my work showcasing my skills and expertise in digital marketing, event planning, and media production.
Memorandum Of Association Constitution of Company.pptseri bangash
www.seribangash.com
A Memorandum of Association (MOA) is a legal document that outlines the fundamental principles and objectives upon which a company operates. It serves as the company's charter or constitution and defines the scope of its activities. Here's a detailed note on the MOA:
Contents of Memorandum of Association:
Name Clause: This clause states the name of the company, which should end with words like "Limited" or "Ltd." for a public limited company and "Private Limited" or "Pvt. Ltd." for a private limited company.
https://seribangash.com/article-of-association-is-legal-doc-of-company/
Registered Office Clause: It specifies the location where the company's registered office is situated. This office is where all official communications and notices are sent.
Objective Clause: This clause delineates the main objectives for which the company is formed. It's important to define these objectives clearly, as the company cannot undertake activities beyond those mentioned in this clause.
www.seribangash.com
Liability Clause: It outlines the extent of liability of the company's members. In the case of companies limited by shares, the liability of members is limited to the amount unpaid on their shares. For companies limited by guarantee, members' liability is limited to the amount they undertake to contribute if the company is wound up.
https://seribangash.com/promotors-is-person-conceived-formation-company/
Capital Clause: This clause specifies the authorized capital of the company, i.e., the maximum amount of share capital the company is authorized to issue. It also mentions the division of this capital into shares and their respective nominal value.
Association Clause: It simply states that the subscribers wish to form a company and agree to become members of it, in accordance with the terms of the MOA.
Importance of Memorandum of Association:
Legal Requirement: The MOA is a legal requirement for the formation of a company. It must be filed with the Registrar of Companies during the incorporation process.
Constitutional Document: It serves as the company's constitutional document, defining its scope, powers, and limitations.
Protection of Members: It protects the interests of the company's members by clearly defining the objectives and limiting their liability.
External Communication: It provides clarity to external parties, such as investors, creditors, and regulatory authorities, regarding the company's objectives and powers.
https://seribangash.com/difference-public-and-private-company-law/
Binding Authority: The company and its members are bound by the provisions of the MOA. Any action taken beyond its scope may be considered ultra vires (beyond the powers) of the company and therefore void.
Amendment of MOA:
While the MOA lays down the company's fundamental principles, it is not entirely immutable. It can be amended, but only under specific circumstances and in compliance with legal procedures. Amendments typically require shareholder
Putting the SPARK into Virtual Training.pptxCynthia Clay
This 60-minute webinar, sponsored by Adobe, was delivered for the Training Mag Network. It explored the five elements of SPARK: Storytelling, Purpose, Action, Relationships, and Kudos. Knowing how to tell a well-structured story is key to building long-term memory. Stating a clear purpose that doesn't take away from the discovery learning process is critical. Ensuring that people move from theory to practical application is imperative. Creating strong social learning is the key to commitment and engagement. Validating and affirming participants' comments is the way to create a positive learning environment.
Personal Brand Statement:
As an Army veteran dedicated to lifelong learning, I bring a disciplined, strategic mindset to my pursuits. I am constantly expanding my knowledge to innovate and lead effectively. My journey is driven by a commitment to excellence, and to make a meaningful impact in the world.
[Note: This is a partial preview. To download this presentation, visit:
https://www.oeconsulting.com.sg/training-presentations]
Sustainability has become an increasingly critical topic as the world recognizes the need to protect our planet and its resources for future generations. Sustainability means meeting our current needs without compromising the ability of future generations to meet theirs. It involves long-term planning and consideration of the consequences of our actions. The goal is to create strategies that ensure the long-term viability of People, Planet, and Profit.
Leading companies such as Nike, Toyota, and Siemens are prioritizing sustainable innovation in their business models, setting an example for others to follow. In this Sustainability training presentation, you will learn key concepts, principles, and practices of sustainability applicable across industries. This training aims to create awareness and educate employees, senior executives, consultants, and other key stakeholders, including investors, policymakers, and supply chain partners, on the importance and implementation of sustainability.
LEARNING OBJECTIVES
1. Develop a comprehensive understanding of the fundamental principles and concepts that form the foundation of sustainability within corporate environments.
2. Explore the sustainability implementation model, focusing on effective measures and reporting strategies to track and communicate sustainability efforts.
3. Identify and define best practices and critical success factors essential for achieving sustainability goals within organizations.
CONTENTS
1. Introduction and Key Concepts of Sustainability
2. Principles and Practices of Sustainability
3. Measures and Reporting in Sustainability
4. Sustainability Implementation & Best Practices
To download the complete presentation, visit: https://www.oeconsulting.com.sg/training-presentations
Unveiling the Secrets How Does Generative AI Work.pdfSam H
At its core, generative artificial intelligence relies on the concept of generative models, which serve as engines that churn out entirely new data resembling their training data. It is like a sculptor who has studied so many forms found in nature and then uses this knowledge to create sculptures from his imagination that have never been seen before anywhere else. If taken to cyberspace, gans work almost the same way.
Tata Group Dials Taiwan for Its Chipmaking Ambition in Gujarat’s DholeraAvirahi City Dholera
The Tata Group, a titan of Indian industry, is making waves with its advanced talks with Taiwanese chipmakers Powerchip Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation (PSMC) and UMC Group. The goal? Establishing a cutting-edge semiconductor fabrication unit (fab) in Dholera, Gujarat. This isn’t just any project; it’s a potential game changer for India’s chipmaking aspirations and a boon for investors seeking promising residential projects in dholera sir.
Visit : https://www.avirahi.com/blog/tata-group-dials-taiwan-for-its-chipmaking-ambition-in-gujarats-dholera/
Falcon stands out as a top-tier P2P Invoice Discounting platform in India, bridging esteemed blue-chip companies and eager investors. Our goal is to transform the investment landscape in India by establishing a comprehensive destination for borrowers and investors with diverse profiles and needs, all while minimizing risk. What sets Falcon apart is the elimination of intermediaries such as commercial banks and depository institutions, allowing investors to enjoy higher yields.
What is the TDS Return Filing Due Date for FY 2024-25.pdfseoforlegalpillers
It is crucial for the taxpayers to understand about the TDS Return Filing Due Date, so that they can fulfill your TDS obligations efficiently. Taxpayers can avoid penalties by sticking to the deadlines and by accurate filing of TDS. Timely filing of TDS will make sure about the availability of tax credits. You can also seek the professional guidance of experts like Legal Pillers for timely filing of the TDS Return.
Exploring Patterns of Connection with Social Dreaming
Operartions research in US Healthcare Industry
1. Using Operations Research to
Reduce Delays for Healthcare
Prepared By:
Achintya PR
Deepti KS
Manish Watharkar
Pallavi Ghandat
Prashant Patro
Shobhit Deo
Sweta Chouhan
Uttara Chattopadhyaya
13020841062
13020841073
13020841083
13020841094
13020841094
13020841102
13020841112
13020841114
2. Abstract
The Institute of Medicine identified “timeliness” as one of six key “aims for improvement” in its
most recent report on quality. Yet patient delays remain prevalent, resulting in dissatisfaction,
adverse clinical consequences, and often, higher costs. This tutorial describes several areas in
which patients routinely experience significant and potentially dangerous delays and presents
operations research (OR) models that have been developed to help reduce these delays, often at
little or no cost. It also describes the difficulties in developing and implementing models as well as
the factors that increase the likelihood of success. Finally, I discuss the opportunities, large and
small, for using OR methodologies to significantly impact practices and policies that will a ect
timely access to healthcare.
Keywords: healthcare; delays; queuing
3. Introduction
Healthcare is riddled with delays. The Institute of Medicine (IOM), the ma jor advisory body to the
government and the private sector on health-related issues, identified timeliness as one of the six
key aims for improvement in its major report on quality of healthcare in 2001. This was in
response to the growing evidence of significant delays across the healthcare industry and the
impact of these delays on clinical outcomes.
Almost all of us have waited for days or weeks to get an appointment with a physician or schedule
a procedure, and upon arrival we wait some more until being seen. In hospitals, it is not unusual to
find patients backlogged in the emergency department waiting room and on stretchers in hallways
waiting for beds. Inpatient falls, which often result in broken bones and serious complications, are
known to be more prevalent when nurses are delayed in answering call buttons. Although waiting
for service is inconvenient and annoying in other situations, in healthcare, delays can be
dangerous or even deadly.
This tutorial will describe some of the major types and sources of delay for healthcare, why they
exist, and how operations research (OR) approaches can help provide insights and guidance for
reducing delays, often with little or no increase in costs. In presenting specific examples, this
tutorial will focus more on the contextual issues that are important to consider in developing,
implementing, and interpreting the results of models than on the technical details of the models
themselves. I will also discuss the regulatory, institutional, and systemic obstacles to using these
methodologies to improve patient access to healthcare and look at e orts to reduce or eliminate
these obstacles in the future. Finally, drawing from experiences across a range of applications, I
will discuss the factors that appear to be most important in the adoption of OR approaches for
reducing healthcare delays and how OR can play a role in influencing healthcare policy.
4. 1. Three Sources of Dangerous Healthcare Delays
1.1. Emergency Department Delays
Arguably, the most critical delays for healthcare are the ones associated with healthcare
emergencies. Unfortunately, emergency department (ED) overcrowding is a continuing and
growing problem. In a 2007 survey (American Hospital Association [2]), nearly half of all U.S.
hospitals and 65% of urban hospitals reported being at or over capacity in their emergency rooms,
resulting in long waits before being seen by a physician and delays of many hours or even days in
getting a hospital bed. Each of these sources of delay can be life threatening.
1.1.1. Delays for ED Physicians
Delays for emergency care generally begin with the wait to be seen by a physician. Many patients
who arrive to an ED are “non-urgent” and would not be harmed by significant delays in seeing a
physician. However, many, if not most, are either “emergent” (requiring “immediate” care) or
“urgent” (requiring care within a “short” period of time). Yet recent studies have revealed that
waits to see an ED physician are long and getting worse. The overall median wait to see an ED
physician increased from 22 minutes in 1997 to 30 minutes by 2004. Perhaps even more
alarmingly, the median wait for patients diagnosed with acute myocardial infarction (AMI) (heart
attacks) increased from 8 minutes in 1997 to 14 minutes in 2004 (Wilper et al. [35]). These figures
are considerably higher in urban areas and for teaching hospitals, where most emergency care is
delivered.
Given the urgency of rapid treatment for victims of heart attack (as well as for sepsis, stroke,
pneumonia, and trauma, among others) these figures, as well as anecdotal reports of patient
deaths in EDs, indicate that these delays are a serious threat to the health and well-being of us all.
In addition, previous studies have established a strong link between long emergency department
delays and the fraction of patients who leave without being seen (LWBS) (Green et al. [16],
Fernandes et al. [8]). The proportion of patients who LWBS is itself an important measure of
emergency department performance and quality of care. Several studies have concluded that
patients who LWBS are sick and do require emergency care. One study has shown that up to 11%
of patients who leave without being seen are hospitalized within a week and 46% of patients were
judged to require immediate medical attention (Baker et al. [5]).
1.1.2. Delays for Inpatient Beds.
Although insufficient ED physician levels are responsible for significant and serious delays in
emergency care, the single biggest cause of ED overcrowding is a lack of inpatient beds (American
Hospital Association [2]). About 25% of
ED patients are admitted to the hospital and approximately 40% of inpatients come through the
ED. For hospitals reporting ED capacity problems, the average time to move a patient from the ED
to an inpatient bed once the decision to admit has been made is over 4.5 hours, and bed delays of
over 24 hours are not uncommon (McCaig and Burt [21]). These delays lead to large numbers of
patients in the ED who strain the ability of the physicians and nurses to care for them. This ED
overcrowding also compromises the ability of ED physicians to treat new arrivals to the ED. When
this kind of situation becomes untenable, a hospital will usually go on ambulance diversion—
suspending new ambulance arrivals to the ED. In a 2007 survey, over half of all urban and teaching
hospitals reported being on diversion in the past 12 months (American Hospital Association [2]).
When hospitals are on diversion, seriously ill patients have to travel further to get to the nearest
hospital, increasing their risk for adverse outcomes. In addition, due to the increased travel time,
waits for ambulances increase, further endangering patients. A study based on data from New
York City showed that when there are significant levels of ambulance diversion in a borough, the
number of deaths due to AMI increases by 44% (Yankovic et al. [37]).
Bed delays can occur even when inpatient beds are available. This is because patients and beds are
not all identical. Hospitals are divided into nursing units, which typically consist of between 20 and
50 beds. Each nursing unit is used for one or more clinical services (i.e., medical, surgical, pediatric,
obstetrics, cardiology, neurology). So a patient with heart disease who is waiting in the ED for a
bed may experience a significant delay if all the cardiology beds are occupied, even though beds
may be available in another clinical unit. In addition, some patients need telemetry beds, which, in
many hospitals, are not available in all nursing units. Finally, most hospital rooms have two or
5. more beds that can be used only by patients of the same gender. So it is possible for, e.g., a female
patient to be delayed in getting an inpatient bed if the only beds that are available are in rooms
occupied by male patients.
The most common delays for inpatient beds are for critical care beds (American Hospital
Association [2]). Intensive care units (ICUs) are usually the most expensive units in the hospital
due to both the technology utilized and the high level of staffing needed. The full per-day cost in an
ICU is about three to five times as much as in a regular inpatient unit (Groeger et al. [17]), and
therefore, hospital administrators believe that these beds should be highly utilized in order to be
“cost efficient.” Consequently, delays for these beds, which are used for the most seriously ill and
injured patients, are often the longest.
1.2. Delays for Medical Appointments
Difficulty in getting a timely appointment to see a physician is a very common problem. In one
study, 33% of patients cited inability to get an appointment soon as a significant obstacle to care
(Strunk and Cunningham [32]). For most patients, their primary care physician is their major
access point into the healthcare system. Yet primary care practices often have long waits for
appointments. The average wait for a primary care appointment in the United States in 2001 was
over three weeks (Murray and Berwick [25]). A more recent survey in Massachusetts found that
the average delay was over six weeks (Mishra [24]). Long appointment backlogs result in difficulty
in accommodating patients who have potentially urgent problems. As a result, patients experience
delays in treatment that may result in adverse clinical consequences and patient dissatisfaction.
Two-thirds of all primary care physicians’ work in group practices, so patients who cannot get an
appointment with their own physician may instead be seen by another physician in the practice.
However, continuity of care has been identified as an important factor in accurate diagnosis and
appropriate treatment (Smoller [30]). Another adverse consequence of long waits for
appointments is the use of the ED for primary care, contributing to the overcrowding mentioned
above.
From the physician practice perspective, large backlogs may require additional staff and resources
to deal with patients trying to get appointments for the same day, and are often correlated with a
high rate of cancellations, resulting in a loss of revenue for the practice.
1.3. Delays for Nursing Care
In a landmark report entitled “To Err is Human” (Institute of Medicine of the National Academies
of Science [19]), the IOM reported that medical errors in hospitals are responsible for between
44,000 and 98,000 deaths each year and for more than one million injuries.
A more recent report from Health grades [18] estimates the number of deaths to be 248,000 per
year. Even at the lowest level, this implies that more people are killed by medical errors than die
from traffic accidents or most forms of cancer. Although the causes of these preventable deaths are
numerous, recent studies have indicated that insufficient nurse staffing levels are a major factor in
the prevalence of medical errors (Aiken et al. [1], Needleman et al. [28]).
This is not surprising because many nursing tasks are time sensitive. These include administration
of medications, responding to patient call buttons, and dealing with emergency admissions.
Although nursing workloads have increased in recent years due to a higher percentage of elderly
and sicker inpatients and shorter hospital lengths of stay, staffing levels in most hospitals have
either remained static or, in many cases, decreased.
Nursing costs comprise a very substantial fraction of hospital budgets, and therefore, cost-effective
nurse staffing is very important. In most hospitals, the number of nurses assigned to a unit is
determined by a specified ratio of patients to nurses. The historical norm for most types of clinical
units has been 8:1, whereas for intensive care units it could be as little as 1:1. Although most
hospitals subscribe to these standards, cost pressures and a national nursing shortage have
resulted in these ratios being exceeded in many cases. Sometimes, however, this is the result of a
failure to adequately plan for the daily, weekly, and sometimes seasonal variations in hospital
census that are common in most clinical units of virtually every hospital. Insufficient inpatient
nursing levels are also a major factor in delays for beds in the ED.
For a patient to be transferred to an inpatient bed from the ED, a nurse needs to be available to
handle the admission to the unit. So if the staffing level in the unit is such that the nurses are highly
utilized, many patients waiting for a bed in that unit will continue to wait even when a bed
6. becomes available.
Nursing levels also play a role in delays for care within the ED. As in other parts of the hospital,
nurses are the primary managers and caretakers of patients. If the number of patients in the ED
gets too high for the nurses to handle, either new arrivals will not be taken into the treatment area
until some of the patients are discharged or moved to inpatient beds, or, if the ED is very
congested, the hospital may go on ambulance diversion.
Delays due to lack of nursing personnel are arguably more problematic in the ED for several
reasons. First, the need for speedy treatment is more urgent. Second, the variability in the volume
and pattern of patient arrivals, as well as their diversity, make it more difficult to predict nursing
needs. And finally, the stress of the work environment in the ED makes it more difficult to attract
and retain nurses and the levels of absenteeism are generally higher than in the rest of the
hospital.
7. 2. Why Are Healthcare Delays So Bad?
Given the enormous impact on society’s well-being, it may be surprising that patients’ delays in
receiving healthcare, as described above, are so bad and, in some cases, may be getting worse.
There are several major reasons for this. First, until recently, these delays and their impact haven’t
been very visible either to the public or, in many instances, even to the healthcare community. This
is because delays in healthcare have not, in general, been measured or reported. The quality
movement came late to healthcare and the focus has traditionally been on clinical innovation, not
timely delivery of service. In national rankings, hospitals have been primarily evaluated on clinical
excellence, which is based on the reputation of their staff physicians. Because hospital prices were
tightly regulated and compensation was based on the fee for service until the early
1990s, hospitals were largely insulated from competitive pressures and, consequently, paid little
or no attention to patient satisfaction. Similarly, until the last several years, the major accreditation
agency for hospitals, The Joint Commission on the Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations,
focused attention on clinical processes rather than service or quality factors, which were rarely
reported.
Second, with the advent of price deregulation and increasing pressure from government,
employers, and managed care organizations, hospitals have been forced to focus on cutting costs.
Due largely to decreased levels of compensation from Medicare and Medicaid, which account for
over 50% of hospital revenues, about one-third of all hospitals have negative operating margins
and the vast majority of them struggle to break even (American Hospital Association [3]). Until the
last few years, the number of hospitals had been steadily declining for decades. Many more have
downsized, particularly since the mid-1990s. Many of these closures and downsizings have been
directly due to the use of target occupancy levels that have been used since the mid-1970s at both
the federal and state government level to evaluate and control the supply of hospital beds
(McClure [22]). As recently as December 2006, a commission set up by Governor Pataki of New
York State mandated the closure of almost 20 hospitals and the downsizing of dozens more using
their finding of an average occupancy rate of 77% compared with the “ideal rate of 85%” as their
primary evidence of “excess capacity” (Commission on Healthcare Facilities in the 21st Century
[7]). This was done without any analyses of the impact on delays for emergency or inpatient care.
At the institutional level, low occupancy levels are often viewed as indicative of operational
inefficiency and potential financial problems. So hospital administrators generally view higher
occupancy levels as desirable.
Third, healthcare needs are highly concentrated within a small percentage of the population.
About two-thirds of all healthcare expenditures are attributable to about 10% of the population.
This population consists primarily of people with chronic diseases such as cardiovascular disease,
cancer, pulmonary illnesses, and diabetes. The percentage of people who have these illnesses has
been steadily increasing, partially as a result of an aging population. This increase in illness is
putting an increasing strain on all aspects of the healthcare delivery system, particularly
emergency rooms and physician practices.
Finally, many delays for healthcare are due to inadequate levels of healthcare professionals,
particularly doctors and nurses. Unfortunately, these are not just local problems, but often a result
of national shortages. The nursing shortage has been well documented; see Figure 1 and U.S.
Department of Health and Human Services [33]. This nursing shortage has seriously impeded
hospital e orts to increase nurse sta ng levels, particularly as opportunities for nursing work
outside of hospitals have increased.
Although it is harder to quantify physician shortages, hospitals often have difficulty in staffing
emergency rooms, particularly for evenings and weekends. Residency programs in emergency
medicine are not as prevalent as for many other specialties, and the compensation is not as high,
making it even more difficult to increase the supply. Emergency departments also have difficulty
getting certain specialists, for example, orthopedist and neurosurgeons, to be “on call” particularly
for evenings and weekends, for the same reasons of inconvenience and relatively poor
compensation (American Hospital Association [2]).
Growing backlogs for medical appointments for primary care are likely due, in part, to a lack of
primary care physicians. The United States has fewer primary care physicians per capita than
almost any other industrialized nation and there is a particular lack in rural areas.
8. 3. How Can OR Help?
3.1. Using OR to Reduce Delays for Emergency Care
In this section, I describe some examples of OR-based studies related to understanding and
reducing the types of healthcare delays described above.
3.1.1. Delays for ED Physicians.
As mentioned above, visits to EDs have been steadily increasing. Constrained provider capacity
relative to demand volume is exacerbated by the extreme variability in demand during each 24hour period experienced by a typical emergency department. This time-of-day pattern, as reported
in the National Hospital Ambulatory Medical Care Survey for 2002 (McCain and Burt [21]), is
distinguished by a relatively low level of demand during the night followed by a precipitous
increase starting at about 8 or 9 a.m., a peak at about noon, and persistently high levels until late
evening. In addition, though the general pattern of demand is similar across the days of the week;
individual days are likely to experience different overall volumes as well as slight differences in the
exact timing of peaks and valleys. In particular, emergency departments are likely to have fewer
visits on weekends than on weekdays.
Though physician staffing levels are generally varied over the day to meet these changing levels,
this is usually done without the aid of operations research models. In study conducted in the ED of
a midsize urban hospital in New York City (Green et al. [14]), the overall volume varied from a low
of 63 patients per day on Saturdays to a high of 72 per day on Mondays. This degree of variation
indicated that the then-current policy of identical staffing levels for all days of the week was likely
suboptimal. However, it was deemed impractical to have a different provider schedule every day
and so it was decided to use queuing analyses to develop two schedules: weekday and weekend.
This required aggregating ED arrival data into these two groups. For each, demand data were
collected for each hour of the day using the hospital’s admissions database to understand the
degree of variation over the day to explore the impact of different shift starting times and/or
staffing levels on delays.
Estimating the average provider service time per patient was more di cult. This time includes
several activities such as direct patient care, review of x-rays and lab tests, phone calls, charting,
and speaking with other providers or consults. In many, if not most, hospitals, these data are not
routinely collected. At the time of the study, provider service times were not recorded and were
estimated indirectly from direct observation and historical productivity data begins by dividing
the workday into planning periods, such as shifts, hours, half-hours, or quarter-hours. Then a
series of stationary queuing models, most often
M/M/s -type models, are constructed, one
for each planning period. Each of these period-specific models is independently solved for the
minimum number of servers needed to meet the service target in that period. In Green et al. [12],
the SIPP approach was shown in many cases to seriously underestimate the number of servers
needed to meet a given delay performance target. This is particularly true when the mean service
times are high (e.g., 30 minutes or more) and planning periods are long (two hours or more). In
these situations, it was demonstrated that a simple variant of SIPP, called Lag SIPP, performs far
better than the simple SIPP approach. The major reason is that in cyclical demand systems, there is
a time lag between the peak in the arrival rate and the peak in system congestion. This lag is
significant when the mean service time is long. Lag SIPP corrects for this factor.
In our ED physician staffing
study Green et al. [12], the
Lag SIPP approach was
applied by first advancing the
arrival rate curve by our
estimate of the average
physician time per patient, 30
minutes. We then constructed
a series of M/M/s models for
each
two-hour
staffing
interval, using the average
arrival rate for each based on
the time-advanced curve and
the estimated average 30-
9. minute service time. The delay standard we choose was that no more than 20% of patients wait
more than one hour before being seen by a provider. The use of one hour is consistent with the
time standards associated with emergent and urgent patient groups used in the National Hospital
Ambulatory Medical Care Survey (McCaig and Burt [21]). The 20% criterion rejected the
approximate percentage of non urgent arrivals at the study institution.
The modeling results gave the number of ED physicians needed in each of the two-hour staffing
intervals to meet the delay standard. In total, 58 physician hours were needed on weekdays to
achieve the desired service standard, which represented an increase of three hours over the
existing staffing level of 55 hours. Model runs for the weekend indicated that the target
performance standard could be achieved with a total of 53 provider hours. In both of these cases,
the queuing analyses suggested that some physician hours should be switched from the middle of
the night to much earlier in the day. A more subtle change suggested
By the model was that the increase in the staffing level to handle the morning surge in demand
needed to occur earlier than in the original schedule. Although resource limitations and physician
availability prevented the staffing suggested by the queuing analyses from being implemented
exactly, the insights gained from these analyses were used to develop new provider schedules.
More specifically, as a result of the analyses one physician was moved from the overnight shift to
an afternoon shift, four hours were moved from the weekends and added to the Monday and
Tuesday afternoon shifts (because these were the two busiest days of the week), and a shift that
previously started at noon was moved to 10 a.m.. At the time of the study, the study hospital did
not collect data on delays to be seen by a physician. So to evaluate the impact of the new staffing
levels, we focused primarily on the effect on the percentage of patients who LWBS. Despite an
increase in patient arrival volume of 6.3%, an increase in provider hours of only 3.1% resulted in a
decrease in the proportion of patients who left without being seen by 22.9%. Restricting attention
to a four-day subset of the week during which there was no increase in total provider hours, a
reallocation of providers based on the queuing analysis resulted in a decrease in the fraction of
patients who left without being seen of 21.7%, although the arrival volume increased by 5.5%.
3.1.2. Delays for Inpatient Beds.
As mentioned above, the most frequently cited reason for ED overcrowding is the lack of critical
care beds. Yet, these units are usually very small and intentionally operated at high levels of
utilization so as to be “cost efficient.” In a study of the impact of target occupancy levels on delays
for time-sensitive conditions (Green [10]), we used the basic
M/M/s model to estimate delays
for ICUs beds in New York State. The assumption of a Poisson arrival process is reasonable in this
situation because many arrivals to ICUs come through the ED and these arrivals have been shown
to be well approximated by this process (see, e.g., Green et al. [14]).
Figure 3 shows the distribution of average occupancy levels for the ICUs in New York State in
1997. The average size of the units in this sample was only 15 beds and the mode was 10 beds and
the data show an average occupancy of 75%. Using the traditional criterion of hospital occupancy
levels, many of these units would be considered to have “excess” beds. Because patients needing
an ICU bed are emergent and any delay can be dangerous, probability of delay was used as the
metric of performance. This measure was also chosen because it depends only on size and server
utilization, which
were
available
from New York
State Institutional
Cost
Reports.
Thus, the number
of beds needed to
meet any delay
target could be
computed easily.
Adopting
a
standard of a
maximum
probability
of
delay of 10%, 112
of the 194 ICUs,
or about 58%,
10. were over utilized. If that target is reduced to 5%, 143 or 74% of the units were to o small to
handle their experienced workloads; for a 1% target, 175 or over 90% were of inadequate size.
These estimates are likely to be conservative for several reasons. First, in an analysis of intensive
care units at Beth Israel Deaconess in Boston, the coefficient of variation of the length of stay
ranged from 1.1 to 1.6 (Green and Nguyen [15]), suggesting that the M/M/s assumption of
exponential service times leads to underestimates of actual congestion. Second, several of the
hospitals had multiple divisions or locations, and the reported units are sometimes the sum of two
or more smaller units. Third, in many larger hospitals, there are several types of ICUs (e.g.,
medical, surgical, neurological, and cardiac). Therefore, some of the unit sizes reported in this data
likely represents the combined size of smaller, specialized units. It is also important to note that
the average reported length of stay in these units was almost 18 days, so that when delays occur,
they are likely to be long. This is consistent with observations reported by ED administrators.
It is also important to note that in performing these types of simplistic analyses, the data used are
not really reflective of the true demands for the units being studied. For example, because many
ICU units are often fully occupied, the hospitals in which they are housed will likely be on “critical
adult” diversion on occasion, so their occupancy levels are based on some unmet demands.
Another reason this may occur is that when patients are waiting in the ED for an ICU bed, less
seriously ill patients in the ICU unit may be transferred to a “step-down” unit to make room for the
more needy new arrivals, hence, reducing the length of stay.
3.2. Using OR to Reduce Delays for Medical Appointments
Many primary care practices have been pressured by managed care companies and lower
compensation levels to take on more patients. As a result, many physicians have been wrestling
with chronically long backlogs for appointments, leading to patient dissatisfaction, increasing
levels of late cancellations, and greater administrative difficulties. The ability to other patient’s
timely appointments requires some minimum physician capacity relative to patient demand. In
discussions with practitioners, I found that one of the central questions in trying to improve access
for patients is what is a “manageable” panel size? Primary care practices and many specialty care
practices, such as cardiology, have a “patient panel”—a set of patients who receive their care from
the practice on some regular basis. So, in these practices, the primary lever to bring demand and
supply into a relationship that is compatible with being able to other short appointment dates is
patient panel size.
To identify a panel size that will result in short waits for appointments with high probability, it is
necessary to explicitly consider the impact of cancellations. Although some patients cancel their
appointments far enough in advance of their scheduled time to allow for a new appointment
request to be substituted, many practices experience a high level of patients who cancel too late for
this to happen or who simply do not show up at the scheduled time. For simplicity, I will refer to
both of these patient types as “no-shows.” Empirical evidence shows that the rate of no-shows
increases with increasing appointment backlogs (Galucci et al. [9]), resulting in more unused
appointment slots and wasted physician time. Therefore, instead of increased patient demand rate
resulting in higher physician utilization,
It may actually result in lower utilization levels. In addition, although some patients fail to appear
at the appointed time because the original reason for the visit no longer exists, other no-shows are
due to personal or work-related problems, or the patient’s decision to seek treatment elsewhere
rather than wait. In the latter situations, many no-shows schedule a new appointment with their
original physician. This is even true when they have sought treatment elsewhere because it is
common practice for clinics and emergency rooms to advise the patient to see their own physician
as well.
According to the model a physician practice appointment system as a single-server queuing
system with deterministic service times in which customers who are about to enter service have a
state-dependent probability of not being served and, with some specified probability, rejoin the
queue. The model’s estimates of backlogs for various panel sizes and cancellation behavior were
compared with those produced from a more realistic simulation model and the results were
shown to be very reliable.
Three important observations resulted from our analyses. First, the impact of cancellations on
appointment backlogs can be very significant. This is illustrated in Figure 4, which, using data
based on an appointment system for a diagnostic imaging facility, compares the estimates of
expected backlog for various patient panels using the queuing model with cancellations as well as
the standard M/D/c model. Second, the panel sizes predicted by the model to be consistent with
11. short delays for appointments are smaller than the 2,500- patient level often suggested by
managed care companies and in the literature (Murray and Tantau [26]). This figure also
highlights another important feature of appointment dynamics in the presence of no-shows: as the
panel size increases, the transition to unmanageable backlogs occurs more rapidly, and over a
narrower interval of panel size values than in the no-cancellation case. This phenomenon is due to
the presence of a positive feedback effect that no-shows exert on the appointment backlog.
Third, it is possible to identify an optimal patient panel size for a given medical practice. As
illustrated in Figure 5, physician utilization initially increases with increasing backlog, as would be
expected in a conventional queuing situation. However, because of the cancellation and
rescheduling dynamics, physician utilization ultimately decreases as the expected backlog
increases. And this occurs at relatively low levels of delay, showing that the right panel size results
in both goo d service for patients as well as high levels of utilization and, hence, revenue for
physicians. In response to a very high level of
interest expressed by physicians who have
learned about our work in this area, we are
now developing an easy-to-use tool that will be
accessible on the Web.
3.3. Reducing Delays for Nursing Care
There has been a great deal of discussion and
debate in the professional nursing world as
well as in state legislatures about how many
nurses are really needed in hospitals. Although
nursing ratios are still the most common
methodology for determining nursing levels,
the old guidelines of 8:1 have been challenged
with the result that, in 2004, California
implemented the first state law mandating
minimum nurse-to-patient staffing levels of one to six in general medical-surgical units
Figure 5. Physician utilization as a function of expected backlog.
Other states are contemplating similar legislation. However, there have been many arguments
made against the use of mandated staffing ratios (Lang et al. [20]). Opponents of mandated ratios
observe that none of the studies of staffing and quality have identified an optimal ratio, and that
ratios are too inflexible to account for variation in nursing skills and the severity of patients’
illnesses.
From an analytical perspective, a clinical unit can be viewed as a finite source queuing system
because demands are generated from the inpatients in that unit. However, due to admissions,
discharges, and transfers, the number of inpatients varies over a shift. Furthermore, each of these
changes in inpatient census triggers a demand for nursing care. So, to identify appropriate nursing
levels, it is necessary to model a single hospital clinical unit as a queuing system with two sets of
servers: nurses and beds. Although patients are usually assigned to a specific nurse for each shift,
it is common practice for any available nurse to attend to a patient if the designated nurse is busy
with other patients. So, it is reasonable to assume that both the nursing system and the bed system
are multi server.
In Yankovic and Green [36], we developed an easy-to-use two-dimensional queuing model for
evaluating the impact of any given nursing level on performance measures such as the expected
waiting time for a nurse, the
probability of being delayed, and
other performance indicators. This
will enable hospital administrators
and nurse managers to determine
nurse staffing levels for various
units and shifts that best fit their
target service standards.
The model that we developed is
part of a major project being
undertaken in conjunction with the
Hospital for Special Surgery in New
York City to determine the
12. feasibility and usefulness of using a queuing model to help guide nurse staffing levels in hospitals.
In addition to the development of the model, the project focuses on the identification of nursing
tasks and the ability to obtain the required input data from both electronic and non-electronic
sources. A specific goal of the project is to inform the development of hospital information
technology (IT) systems with regard to operational data that should be routinely collected to
inform nurse staffing decisions and evaluate the impact of nurse staffing levels. This will be the
first attempt to tie nurse staffing levels to measures of responsiveness to patient needs such as
medication orders and call button requests for help.
From a policy perspective, the model can be used to demonstrate the potential problems with
using the type of mandated nurse to patient ratios legislated by California. Specifically, our
analyses showed that whereas a 1:6 nurse to patient ratio may insure a small probability of delay,
i.e., less than 5%, for nursing demands in a busy clinical unit of 60 beds, an otherwise similar unit
with only 30 beds would require a minimum of 1:5 ratio to achieve the same delay performance.
This is not surprising for anyone who understands that queuing systems exhibit economies of
scale. Less obviously, our results showed that the average length of stay
can also have an effect of effective nursing levels. In particular, since the admissions and discharge
processes require a significant amount of nursing time, units with shorter lengths of stay will
require higher staffing levels than those with longer lengths of stay.
Because the model tracks the number of patients in the unit and assumes, as in reality, that a new
patient cannot be admitted to the unit unless a nurse is available, the model can be used to
estimate the impact of nursing levels on delays for patients waiting in the ED. This is particularly
important because nurse availability is often overlooked as a factor affecting ED delays.
13. 4. Obstacles to Using OR to Reduce Healthcare
Delays
4.1. Lack of Operational and Performance Data
As mentioned above, hospitals and other healthcare providers have not, in general, collected data
on operational performance including delays. So, for example, in trying to evaluate the use of the
queuing-based physician staffing levels that were implemented at the Allen Pavilion at New YorkPresbyterian Hospital, as described in the previous section, we couldn’t compare the effect on
arguably the most important performance metric—delay in being treated by a physician. Similarly,
although some hospitals do collect the delays for inpatient beds in the ED, they do usually do not
collect these by clinical unit or service type. Therefore, there is no easy way to determine which
units/services are chronically short on bed capacity. Although certain types of operational data are
routinely kept by hospitals and/or physicians, e.g., arrivals to a facility, lengths of stay in a hospital,
lengths of appointment slots, etc., there is a great deal of data that are needed for a mo del that are
not usually not documented. For example, in our ED physician study (Green et al. [14] the time that
ED physicians spend with patients was not recorded. In speaking with physician practices we
found that information on actual requests for appointments by physician and no-show rates are
usually not kept. And one of the biggest challenges to using a queuing model to support nurse
staffing is identifying IT systems and processes for collecting data on both requests and durations
for nursing care.
4.2. Physician Resistance
Although the resources of a hospital are largely controlled by the physicians who work there, in
most hospitals, most physicians are not employees of the hospital. This makes it very difficult to
get physicians to adopt new practices. Even if the physicians are employees, hospital
administrators are often loath to put pressure on them to change their behavior. This is because
the reputation of a hospital is primarily based on the reputation of the physicians who work there
and competition for good physicians can be intense, particularly in certain specialties. So, it is
important for the hospital to keep physicians happy, and this is reflected in the culture of the
hospital. Non-physicians generally defer to physicians on nonclinical as well as clinical issues.
This physician independence can clearly interfere with e orts to change the allocation or
management of resources. An example of this occurred after the implementation of the new ED
physician staffing plan at the Allen Pavilion. Under the new plan, the number of ED physicians
working the Sunday night shift was reduced from two to one to increase the level of staffing in the
late evening on Mondays and Tuesdays. However, within a year of implementing the new plan,
staffing reverted to the old pattern because the physician working solo on the Sunday shift was
unhappy with that arrangement. Similarly, we have observed on several occasions how physician
requests for preferential treatment for specific patients take precedence over any existing
schedule for, e.g., imaging, even if there is no clinical urgency associated with the request.
Physician in sequence is particularly important in issues of inpatient bed use. Physicians can be
very territorial about the number and use of beds in their services, particularly in academic
medical centers where the teaching and research functions often lead to clinical units or subunits
being restricted to relatively small categories of patients.
4.3. Lack of Cost/Revenue Information
Although the mission of hospitals and other health delivery facilities is to provide care for patients
in an effective and timely manner, these facilities are under enormous cost pressures from
managed care and government payers. Therefore, it is not surprising that e orts are focused on
cutting costs and increasing revenues. This often leads to myopic behavior, which may endanger
patients and even be suboptimal for the facility. For example, many hospitals view their
emergency departments as cost centers because they are very expensive to operate and the
compensation provided by Medicare and insurance companies does not cover the costs. This may
be compounded by a high level of uninsured patients using the ED for whom the hospital may
never receive any payment. Therefore, it is not surprising that many hospitals are not very
motivated to shorten delays for ED care. However, many hospitals who have analyzed the financial
implications of high levels of patients who LWBS and ambulance diversions due to long ED delays
have come to the conclusion that these can lead to significant loss of revenue for two reasons: (1)
25% to 50% of patients arriving to the ED are admitted to the hospital and the revenues generated
from their stays can easily compensate for the costs of ED care, and (2) patients who experience
14. long ED delays may not return to the hospital when they have elective surgery.
4.4. “Toxic” Payment Systems
Hospital and physician compensation are largely based on Medicare reimbursement systems,
which have historically favored procedures over medical care. So, even at present, services like
cardiac and orthopedic surgery are far more profitable than care for, e.g., pneumonia or asthma.
For this reason, hospitals try to admit as many surgical patients as possible and often engage in
marketing e orts to attract these patients. Because many hospitals have general medical/surgical
units, the greater the fraction of surgical patients, who are generally elective, the fewer beds are
available for patients admitted from the ED. Recent cuts in Medicare payments to hospitals have
resulted in an even greater incentive for hospitals to focus on elective surgical patients, for whom
they have a positive operating margin, as opposed to medical patients who often lead to operating
losses. This is one of the major underlying reasons that ED overcrowding has become a growing
problem. A similar situation exists for physician practices. Most physician payment systems
reimburse based on the volume of patient visits. This encourages physicians to generate patient
visits for issues that could be handled by phone or e-mail exchanges, which are generally not
compensated and, thus, can lead to longer delays for appointments.
4.5. Estimating Demands
One of the biggest obstacles to using OR methodologies to reduce delays for healthcare is in
identifying the “true” demand for healthcare services. It is well known in the healthcare world that
the demand for healthcare is distorted by several factors. First, because much of healthcare is paid
for by third parties rather than the consumers themselves, demand is very much influenced by the
size of deductions and copayments. A famous study by Rand Health [29] showed that people who
paid a larger share of their healthcare used fewer services, but in general, had the same health
outcomes. Demand has also been shown to be highly dependent on supply. For example, cities
with more hospital beds per capita have higher rates of hospitalization. Physician practice patterns
also significantly influence the use of healthcare resources (Wennberg et al. [34]). These studies
illustrate the difficulty of estimating and predicting demands for healthcare services and, hence,
the capacities needed to serve a given population.
15. 5. Summary and Conclusions
Healthcare managers and physicians are increasingly aware of the need to use their resources as
efficiently as possible to continue to assure that their institutions survive and prosper. This is
particularly true in light of the growing demands for healthcare due to an increase in older
patients and the prevalence of chronic diseases, and a continuing threat of sudden and severe
demand surges due to outbreaks of epidemics such as SARS and avian u, or terrorist incidents.
Effective resource management is critical to this objective as well as to improving patients’ ability
to receive the most appropriate care in a timely fashion.
Yet, effective capacity management must deal with complexities such as trade-o s between bed
flexibility and quality of care, demands from competing sources and types of patients, time-varying
demands, and the often differing perspectives of administrators, physicians, nurses, and patients.
All of these are chronic and pervasive challenges affecting the ability of healthcare managers to
control the cost and improve the quality of healthcare delivery. To meet these challenges,
managers must inform by operational and performance data and use these data in models to gain
insights that cannot be obtained from experience and intuition alone.
The growing capabilities and installation of healthcare IT systems in hospitals and health-care
practices are making it increasingly possible to collect and organize the data needed to create and
implement OR methodologies. However, OR professionals are needed to help guide the
development of these systems so that the appropriate data will be identified and processes
developed to collect and use these data to fuel the methodologies. Sometimes, the process of
conducting a study in a healthcare facility can lead to the needed IT capabilities. This happened
subsequent to our ED physician staffing project (Green et al. [14]) where, as a result of our study,
the hospital implemented a new electronic data collection system for capturing physician delays.
5.2. Some Caveats
As described above, it is essential to be aware of the organizational structure, culture, and
constraints when trying to develop and implement OR models in healthcare delivery systems. This
requires a general understanding of the healthcare system and the financial, human resource and
regulatory environment in which it operates. It also requires close working relationships with the
physicians, nurses, and other professionals who will be affected by the proposed methodology to
fully appreciate all of the factors relevant to structuring the mo del, estimating the parameters, and
developing performance objectives.
This does not mean that an OR model need be complex to be useful. To the contrary, sometimes a
simple model can lead to important insights. An example of this is the use of a standard Markovian
queuing model to gain insights about the bed capacity needs of intensive care units. Similarly, even
though the non-continuous nature of physician interactions with patients in the ED did not fit the
assumption of exponential service times that was used in the study of ED staffing, and the staffing
changes suggested by the analyses could not be implemented exactly because of shift constraints,
the insights about the relative capacity needs of different days of the week and different times of
days led to new staffing patterns that improved service.
In fact, there is reason to believe that a very simple-to-use OR-based tool has the greatest potential
for widespread adoption. An article describing a spreadsheet-based simple binomial mo del for
estimating patient panel sizes for medical practices was published in a widely read medical journal
and subsequently featured on the. The result was hundreds of e-mails to the authors requesting
the spreadsheet from various types of practices, clinics, and hospitals across the country. This
reveals that there is a significant level of interest in using models to improve patient service,
particularly if they are easily accessible.
5.3. The Bigger Picture
Healthcare delivery systems are increasingly the subject of political discussions and debates as the
United States and other countries struggle to reduce costs and improve quality and access. Much of
these discussions center around whether there are to o many or too few healthcare resources such
as inpatient beds, physicians, nurses, and imaging facilities. Unfortunately, the politicians and
policy professionals are often guided, or misguided, by simplistic frameworks and guidelines that
totally inappropriate and potentially dangerous. This was dramatically demonstrated in 1987–
1988 when New York City experienced a severe and protracted citywide shortage of inpatient
hospital beds. During this period, ambulances were routinely turned away from full hospitals and
urgently sick patients experienced delays of days waiting for an open bed. This hospital crisis
16. followed a two-year period in which capacity declined by 9% because of new state regulations
linking Medicaid reimbursement to achieving occupancy levels of at least 85% to reduce the
number of “excess” beds in the city [36]. Operations research can and should play a role in these
critical discussions and decisions regarding capacity needs and uses. To achieve this, operations
researchers need to develop and/or use models that can illustrate the potential adverse
consequences of existing or proposed policies, such as hospital closings or mandated nursing
ratios, and publish and publicize their findings in medical journals, newsletters, and newspapers.
The potential impact can literally make a difference of life or death for many people.