Best Practices— Doc-to-Disposition Interval

Now that we have a good understanding of what affects the door-to-doc interval and the countermeasures to ¤x it, we will move on to the in-emergency department (ED) segment of patient throughput (Figure 12.1). We have seen that we can alleviate some of the waiting in the ED by segmentation and properly aligning demand with capacity. However, as we mentioned earlier, some of the waiting on the front end has to do with factors in the ED or in the hospital. We will cover the doc-to-dispo elements in this chapter. We’ll examine this interval of patient throughput in this chapter, particularly focusing on the critical servers in the ED.