| The ability to quantify patient flow and the degree of crowding in emergency departments (ED) is essential to solving patient flow delays. There is currently no consistent standard for doing so.The proposed balanced scorecard and its metrics provide a framework from which practitioners can draw. In particular, the Emergency Department Work Index (EDWIN) score, hospital occupancy, ED above capacity are recommended to be included in future ED patient flow measurement systems. Finally, the analysis suggests that the EDWIN score is a useful real-time indicator of ED crowding in Canadian acute care hospitals.The objective of this thesis was to design a framework and identify a set of metrics to measure ED patient flow in Canadian acute care hospitals. Recognizing the diversity in culture and processes between different hospitals, the goal was to create a framework of metrics upon which different hospitals can build their own measurement system. |
