An important contributor to the well-known problem of Emergency Department (ED) overcrowding is prolonged boarding of patients who are admitted through the ED. Patients admitted through the ED constitute about 50% of all non-obstetrical hospital admissions, and may be boarded in the ED for long...

In various organizations including hospitals, individuals are not forced to follow specific assignments, and thus, deviations from preferred task assignments are common. This is due to the conventional wisdom that professionals should be given the flexibility to deviate from preferred...

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...

Hospital Emergency Departments (ED's) typically use triage systems that classify and prioritize patients almost exclusively in terms of their need for timely care. Using a combination of analytic and simulation models, we demonstrate that adding an up-front estimate of patient complexity to...