Hospital emergency department surveillance system: a data base for patient care, management, research and teaching

The Johns Hopkins Health Services Research and Development Center and Emergency Department have developed a processing and feedback mechanism to provide a data base for management planning, allocating available resources, research strategies to evaluate the quality of care and teaching programs to train physicians in emergency medicine. A 10% sample of all emergency department visits is randomly selected each day, and data collected on patient age, sex, race, marital status, mode of arrival, method of payment, census tract of residence, complaint, diagnosis, disposition, date of visit, and times of entry and departure. In addition, process data on nursing care are collected. A sub-sample is selected for telephone or household follow-up aimed at gathering outcome data as part of the surveillance study. Turnaround time from the subject's emergency department visit to provider's feedback is one month. Thus, an ongoing, current description of usage is available. Retrieval of data for longer time periods provides valuable information on daily, monthly and seasonal usage patterns.