Hospitals
Hospitals' minimizing diversions from their emergency departments could reduce patient transfers between hospitals, while yielding only small changes in the number of hospital admissions and ambulance runs, a study in the Journal of Emergency Medicine reports.
For the study, researchers compared five San Diego County hospitals' ED census, ambulance transports and admissions over three weeks. Hospitals were asked to minimize their usage of ED bypass during the second week.
Noting that hospitals' decision to order ambulances to bypass their EDs can push other hospitals to take the same action, the authors reported that systems that seek to minimize the amount of time hospitals spend with their EDs on bypass could be adopted effectively without significant impact on individual EDs (Khaleghi et al., Journal of Emergency Medicine, August 2007).