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When emergency departments get crowded, hospitals are forced to divert ambulances to other facilities; this practice delays initial treatment for patients and can cost hospitals thousands of dollars per hour in lost revenue. Traditional emergency department interventions, such as physician triage and bedside registration, have had minimal benefits for alleviating congestion and attenuating ambulance diversion.
In this pre-post study, performed at Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center (a 335-bed university-affiliated institution in Baltimore), researchers examined whether hospitalist-run active bed management could lower ambulance diversion hours and emergency department throughput times. Active bed management was performed in 12-hour shifts a…