Tension in the Emergency Department? The Impact of Flow Stage Times on Managing Patient‐Reported Experiences and Financial Productivity
研究急诊科如何通过优化患者流程阶段时间，同时改善患者体验和财务绩效，发现医生主导的评估时间阶段是关键杠杆，但需考虑评估时间的递减价值及患者等待时间的影响。
ABSTRACT Healthcare providers are expected to compete across multiple performance dimensions, thereby managing both their financial productivity and the patients’ “in process” experiences. This fact creates tensions in some healthcare settings, as providers need to provide high‐quality care and positive customer experiences while still being financially responsible. Increasingly, these goals create pressures that require emergency departments (EDs) to generate operational efficiencies to improve how healthcare providers manage patient flow at different service stages and to deliver better care for an increasing number of patients at a more reasonable cost. From the perspective of managing patient process flow stage times, this article uses online ratings and secondary source data to examine how EDs can simultaneously improve both experiential and financial productivity performance. Our findings strongly indicate that EDs may be able to leverage the physician‐directed evaluation time stage to improve departmental efficiencies in both performance areas. However, the diminishing value of evaluation time and the time a patient spends in pre‐care for ED services are necessary contingencies to consider. Finally, to illustrate the practical relevance of these findings, we explore the perceived tradeoffs of managing the different patient flow time stages.