Consensus statement on advancing research in emergency department operations and its impact on patient care.

Consensus statement on advancing research in emergency department operations and its impact on patient care.

Yiadom Maame Yaa A B; Ward Michael J; Chang Anna Marie; Pines Jesse M; Jouriles Nick; Yealy Donald M

Academic emergency medicine : official journal of the Society for Academic Emergency Medicine

2015

2015-06

The consensus conference on "Advancing Research in Emergency Department (ED) Operations and Its Impact on Patient Care," hosted by The ED Operations Study Group (EDOSG), convened to craft a framework for future investigations in this important but understudied area. The EDOSG is a research consortium dedicated to promoting evidence-based clinical practice in emergency medicine. The consensus process format was a modified version of the NIH Model for Consensus Conference Development. Recommendations provide an action plan for how to improve ED operations study design, create a facilitating research environment, identify data measures of value for process and outcomes research, and disseminate new knowledge in this area. Specifically, we call for eight key initiatives: 1) the development of universal measures for ED patient care processes; 2) attention to patient outcomes, in addition to process efficiency and best practice compliance; 3) the promotion of multisite clinical operations studies to create more generalizable knowledge; 4) encouraging the use of mixed methods to understand the social community and human behavior factors that influence ED operations; 5) the creation of robust ED operations research registries to drive stronger evidence-based research; 6) prioritizing key clinical questions with the input of patients, clinicians, medical leadership, emergency medicine organizations, payers, and other government stakeholders; 7) more consistently defining the functional components of the ED care system, including observation units, fast tracks, waiting rooms, laboratories, and radiology subunits; and 8) maximizing multidisciplinary knowledge dissemination via emergency medicine, public health, general medicine, operations research, and nontraditional publications.

Congresses and Conferences; Consensus; Emergency Medical Services; Emergency Medicine; Emergency Service; Health Services Research/*organization & administration; Hospital/*organization & administration/standards; Humans; Information Dissemination; Multicenter Studies as Topic; Outcome Assessment (Health Care); Patient Care – Methods; Patient Care/*trends; Public Health; Qualitative Studies; Research – Evaluation; Systems Analysis

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757–764

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