Optimizing Emergency Department Scheduling in Real-Time

The Need

Emergency Departments are faced with many challenges, not the least of which are overcrowding and understaffing.  For ED medical directors, the problem of emergency department scheduling is not only having enough staff scheduled, but having the right staff at the right time to treat the right patients.  Patient arrivals can be highly variable, with sudden fluctuations in volume from hour to hour, different types of patients arriving during different times of day, vastly different patterns by day of week, and even seasonal changes associated with flu, school calendars, and local demographics.  Traditionally, coverage schedules are planned based on volumes of patients, averaged over large periods of times, with little consideration to this variability – and often simply by gut hunch.   This can lead to over coverage during some hours of the day, representing substantial financial loss, and can lead to under coverage at other times, leading to long times, high walk-out rates, and risks to patients.

In our role as a Physician Support Resource, we set out to address this problem, specifically as it pertains to Physician and APP staffing for our client physician practices.  We sought to answer the question for our clients –

“How do we optimize provider schedules in an objective and systematic approach that reflects the realities of the Emergency Department?”