Crisis level overcrowding conditions in Emergency Departments (ED's) have led hospitals to seek out new patient flow designs to improve both responsiveness and safety. One approach that has attracted attention and experimentation in the emergency medicine community is a system in which ED beds...

Service times of customers often depend on the delay they experience in queue, as was recently demonstrated empirically in restaurants, call centers and intensive care units. Two forms of dependence mechanisms in service systems with customer abandonment immediately come to mind: First, the...