Patients flow optimization in ED: an operational research on the impacts of physician triage

Etienne Joubert, Marie-Alix Espinasse and Michel Nakhla ()
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Etienne Joubert: LAMSADE - Laboratoire d'analyse et modélisation de systèmes pour l'aide à la décision - Université Paris Dauphine-PSL - PSL - Université Paris Sciences et Lettres - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique
Marie-Alix Espinasse: Cytokines, chimiokines et immunopathologie - UP11 - Université Paris-Sud - Paris 11 - IFR13 - INSERM - Institut National de la Santé et de la Recherche Médicale
Michel Nakhla: CGS i3 - Centre de Gestion Scientifique i3 - Mines Paris - PSL (École nationale supérieure des mines de Paris) - PSL - Université Paris Sciences et Lettres - I3 - Institut interdisciplinaire de l’innovation - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, AgroParisTech

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Abstract: Emergency Departments (ED) face chronic issues such as longer length of stay and decreased quality of care. These organizations have developed the use of Lean manufacturing techniques to improve patients flow. Adaptations of Lean in healthcare almost systematically return positive results and negative potential effects are underestimated. We use the still debating issue on whether a physician should take part of the triage to explore the pros and cons of a Lean technique in healthcare. We show that triage physicians impact "low-severity" patients length of care and do not impact inpatients one. We also show that physician triage is associated with a higher length of triage that can create a waiting lines before the triage operation. We discuss these results by showing that the decision to implement Lean techniques should be taken considering a risk / benefits trade-off, which is hardly the case actually.

Keywords: Emergency departments; Lean manufacturing; Triage; operation management; patients flow optimization; Healthcare; Operational research (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015-10-21
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Published in 6th IESM Conference (Industrial Engineering and Systems Management), Oct 2015, Seville, Spain. ⟨10.1109/IESM.2015.7380220⟩

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hal:journl:hal-01563167

DOI: 10.1109/IESM.2015.7380220

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