Background: Migraine headache is a common pediatric disorder frequently leading to hospital admission. Inpatient migraine headache treatment involves increasingly complex treatments, including fluid resuscitation and a variety of medications and therapies. Our previous study(1) has shown that the cost of inpatient treatment for pediatric migraine headache is increasing at a higher rate than reported overall [...]

Background: Keeping admitted patients in the emergency room (ER) carries negative operational and clinical consequences. Prolonged stays reduce ER bed turnover, thereby limiting access for other patients. Furthermore prolonged ER length of stay (LOS) has shown to be an independent risk factor for 30 day mortality for admitted patients. For these reasons, Veterans Affairs (VA) [...]

Background: Emergency department (ED) crowding has been proven to worsen outcomes and increase mortality for patients presenting to the ED. Our innovative ED Surge program works collaboratively with our ED to transfer lower acuity patients to an on-site, same-day ambulatory setting after initial evaluation in the ED. We aim to characterize the impact of our [...]

Background: Our 165-bed community hospital is in a phase of rapid growth due to demographic changes and expansion of services offered within the hospital. While offering unprecedented level of healthcare access to the community, improvement with emergency department (ED) throughput has emerged as one of our challenges from a patient safety perspective. Unnecessarily prolonged ED [...]