Can We Reduce Boarding Time in the Pediatric Emergency Department?

Patients visiting the emergency department (ED) can end up waiting, or “boarding,” for a long time before transfer to an inpatient care area. If the need for admission could be recognized early in the ED visit, the process to assign an inpatient bed and transfer the patient could be improved, and boarding time potentially reduced.

Researchers in a pediatric ED developed and validated a model to predict hospital admission using data readily available in the electronic health record during the ED encounter. They retrospectively analyzed data from more than 59,000 ED visits, of which about 12,000 resulted in hospitalization and over 47,000 in discharge. The average length of stay in the ED was 6.5 hours for the hospitalized patients and 3.6 hou…