Process Improvement Approaches for Increasing the Response of Emergency Departments against the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Systematic Review

Miguel Angel Ortíz-Barrios, Dayana Milena Coba-Blanco, Juan-José Alfaro-Saíz and Daniela Stand-González
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Miguel Angel Ortíz-Barrios: Department of Productivity and Innovation, Universidad de la Costa CUC, Barranquilla 081001, Colombia
Dayana Milena Coba-Blanco: Department of Productivity and Innovation, Universidad de la Costa CUC, Barranquilla 081001, Colombia
Juan-José Alfaro-Saíz: Research Centre on Production Management and Engineering, Universitat Politècnica de València, 46022 Valencia, Spain
Daniela Stand-González: Department of Productivity and Innovation, Universidad de la Costa CUC, Barranquilla 081001, Colombia

IJERPH, 2021, vol. 18, issue 16, 1-31

Abstract: The COVID-19 pandemic has strongly affected the dynamics of Emergency Departments (EDs) worldwide and has accentuated the need for tackling different operational inefficiencies that decrease the quality of care provided to infected patients. The EDs continue to struggle against this outbreak by implementing strategies maximizing their performance within an uncertain healthcare environment. The efforts, however, have remained insufficient in view of the growing number of admissions and increased severity of the coronavirus disease. Therefore, the primary aim of this paper is to review the literature on process improvement interventions focused on increasing the ED response to the current COVID-19 outbreak to delineate future research lines based on the gaps detected in the practical scenario. Therefore, we applied the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) guidelines to perform a review containing the research papers published between December 2019 and April 2021 using ISI Web of Science, Scopus, PubMed, IEEE, Google Scholar, and Science Direct databases. The articles were further classified taking into account the research domain, primary aim, journal, and publication year. A total of 65 papers disseminated in 51 journals were concluded to satisfy the inclusion criteria. Our review found that most applications have been directed towards predicting the health outcomes in COVID-19 patients through machine learning and data analytics techniques. In the overarching pandemic, healthcare decision makers are strongly recommended to integrate artificial intelligence techniques with approaches from the operations research (OR) and quality management domains to upgrade the ED performance under social-economic restrictions.

Keywords: healthcare; emergency department; COVID-19; process improvement; systematic review (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I I1 I3 Q Q5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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