TY - GEN
T1 - Linking Patient Alone Time and Provider Time to Staffing Levels and LOS at the Emergency Department
T2 - 2016 IEEE International Conference on Healthcare Informatics, ICHI 2016
AU - Arunachalam, Shivaram P.
AU - Marisamy, Gomathi
AU - Sir, Mustafa
AU - Nestler, David
AU - Hellmich, Thomas
AU - Pasupathy, Kalyan
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2016 IEEE.
PY - 2016/12/6
Y1 - 2016/12/6
N2 - Radio Frequency Identification Device (RFID) technology use in health care services has been shown to save lives, prevents errors, save costs and increases security. Implementation of RFID technology has been challenged with high implementation costs, substantial gap between technology implementation costs and the RFID-enabled benefits, lack of common standard of usage/data analysis and low operational performance level in a harsh environment. Yet, there is a growing interest of RFID use in health care sector which has attracted many researchers to investigate potential opportunities in many specialties especially the Emergency Department (ED) where critical and quality care is sought for life saving service in a timely fashion. In this work, RFID data within the ED was used to quantify 'patient alone' time and 'total provider time' which is studied to establish the relationship between Length of Stay (LOS) and physician staffing levels. Surprisingly, results indicate that LOS has no relationship between patient alone time and provider time. With respect to physician staffing at the ED, more physicians within a LOS period leads to longer patient alone time. Average patient alone time increases initially and then significantly drops with increase in patient to physician ratio. These finding motivates further investigation on larger dataset for validation which can provide insights to strategize allocation of health care workers for more focused service to improve care, reduce LOS and subsequently reduce the cost and improve operating capacity of the ED.
AB - Radio Frequency Identification Device (RFID) technology use in health care services has been shown to save lives, prevents errors, save costs and increases security. Implementation of RFID technology has been challenged with high implementation costs, substantial gap between technology implementation costs and the RFID-enabled benefits, lack of common standard of usage/data analysis and low operational performance level in a harsh environment. Yet, there is a growing interest of RFID use in health care sector which has attracted many researchers to investigate potential opportunities in many specialties especially the Emergency Department (ED) where critical and quality care is sought for life saving service in a timely fashion. In this work, RFID data within the ED was used to quantify 'patient alone' time and 'total provider time' which is studied to establish the relationship between Length of Stay (LOS) and physician staffing levels. Surprisingly, results indicate that LOS has no relationship between patient alone time and provider time. With respect to physician staffing at the ED, more physicians within a LOS period leads to longer patient alone time. Average patient alone time increases initially and then significantly drops with increase in patient to physician ratio. These finding motivates further investigation on larger dataset for validation which can provide insights to strategize allocation of health care workers for more focused service to improve care, reduce LOS and subsequently reduce the cost and improve operating capacity of the ED.
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U2 - 10.1109/ICHI.2016.17
DO - 10.1109/ICHI.2016.17
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:85010369749
T3 - Proceedings - 2016 IEEE International Conference on Healthcare Informatics, ICHI 2016
SP - 102
EP - 105
BT - Proceedings - 2016 IEEE International Conference on Healthcare Informatics, ICHI 2016
A2 - Fu, Wai-Tat
A2 - Zheng, Kai
A2 - Hodges, Larry
A2 - Stiglic, Gregor
A2 - Blandford, Ann
PB - Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
Y2 - 4 October 2016 through 7 October 2016
ER -