In some hospitals, increasing patients’ visits not only results in overcrowding but also huge
wait time for minor or serious problems. Waiting time could be wasted before admission,
treatment or tests. First a flow chart will illustrate the regular process when a newly patient
arrived. The patient needs to be admitted to ED, about 1 hour averagely waiting time
spending in waiting room. This time lap is also called boarder time. When they are
admitted, the ED stuff will ask the patient for some tests to diagnose the illness patient
may have. ED equipment resources could affect this time. For example, a physician may
perform electrocardiogram (ECG) to diagnose if a newly arrived patient is having a heart
attack first. If the machine is occupied at the moment, the patient need to wait until it is
available. For most circumstances, the patient need to go though several tests before
doctors can draw a conclusion of if the patient need to go inpatient telemetry unit (IU),
observation unit or coronary care unit. If a patient is advised to go IU, the time will be
affect similarly by IU resources, such as bed situation, surgery date and so on. In IU,
patient will spend most time on treatment and recovery.
Apart from machine test doctor diagnose time, the link time between those hand-over
processes is significantly wasted for waiting patent in ED. In the recent years, the waiting
time is increasing which sharpened the problem of overcrowding in EDs. Figure 1 shows
the mean waiting time increased 25% from 46.5 minutes to 58.1 minutes from 2003
