Background: Emergency Department (ED) boarding, which occurs when admitted patients do not have an available bed in the hospital, has been associated with adverse patient outcomes. In 2014, 13,109 patients waited greater than 2 hours for a medicine inpatient bed at our large urban academic center. In July 2016, we deployed a 24-hour hospital medicine [...]

Background: The high volume of handoffs between the Emergency Department (ED) team and the inpatient team on a daily basis makes this a ripe area for care improvement. Effective, safe and organized transitions facilitate high quality and efficient care, while a dysfunctional process negatively affects patients and practitioners and compounds overall hospital congestion and delays [...]

Background: Both inappropriate hospital admissions and inappropriate discharges from the ED are associated with adverse patient outcomes. Little is known about the accuracy (sensitivity and specificity) of the hospital admission triage process. Purpose: We sought to understand the operating characteristics of our triage process to identify opportunities for improvement and project an optimal model. Description: [...]