Improving Emergency Department Flow: Reducing Turnaround Time for Emergent CT Scans

Area of Science:

• Emergency Medicine
• Radiology
• Healthcare Operations

Background:

• Emergency departments (EDs) face significant congestion, impacting patient flow and treatment.
• Long turnaround times for diagnostic imaging, particularly computed tomography (CT) scans, are a primary cause of ED delays.
• The average time from CT order to final radiologist report in the ED was 5.9 hours pre-intervention.

Purpose of the Study:

• To identify barriers to efficient CT scan workflow in the ED.
• To implement a multidisciplinary intervention bundle to reduce CT scan turnaround time.
• To improve overall patient flow and capacity within the emergency department.

Main Methods:

• Formation of a multidisciplinary team including physicians, nurses, technicians, transporters, informaticians, and engineers.
• Identification of technical and human-factors barriers within the CT imaging process.
• Implementation of a bundled intervention strategy to address identified barriers.

Main Results:

• A reduction of 1.2 hours in the average CT scan turnaround time was achieved post-intervention.
• This improvement occurred despite a 13.8% increase in the number of CT scans ordered during the study period.
• The reduction in turnaround time was statistically significant (p<0.0001).

Conclusions:

• A multidisciplinary, systems-based approach can effectively reduce CT scan turnaround times in busy emergency departments.
• Optimizing imaging workflow is essential for improving patient flow and ED capacity.
• Interventions targeting both technical and human factors are key to successful healthcare process improvement.