Early Warning Software for Emergency Department Crowding

Emergency department (ED) crowding is a well-recognized threat to patient safety and it has been repeatedly associated with increased mortality. Accurate forecasts of future service demand could lead to better resource management and has the potential to improve treatment outcomes. This logic has motivated an increasing number of research articles but there has been little to no effort to move these findings from theory to practice. In this article, we present first results of a prospective crowding early warning software, that was integrated to hospital databases to create real-time predictions every hour over the course of 5 months in a Nordic combined ED using Holt-Winters' seasonal methods. We show that the software could predict next hour crowding with an AUC of 0.94 (95% CI: 0.91-0.97) and 24 hour crowding with an AUC of 0.79 (95% CI: 0.74-0.84) using simple statistical models. Moreover, we suggest that afternoon crowding can be predicted at 1 p.m. with an AUC of 0.84 (95% CI: 0.74-0.91).