ER Wait

We track the time Medicine patients spend in the ER before being admitted to a medicine ward bed. (not applicable to ICU)

Purposes of collecting "ER Wait" data:

To assess the time delay' from when a patient is first accepted to Medicine Physician Service while in the site's own ER (emergency room) to when the patient physically arrives to a medicine ward bed of the same hospital. (This is done in conjunction with Admit_date_and_time#Definition_for_Medicine).

Collection Guideline

For every patient admitted from the ER', enter date and time arrived to medicine ward bed

• Any patient admitted from the ER MUST have one ER Wait date/time entered into tmp file. It does not matter if first bed moved to into an in-service or off-service bed.

• project: ER_Wait
• as appropriate one of the following items
  • ER admit - means the patient is admitted to your own hospital ER under an ER physician service and then accepted to the medicine service of the same hospital.
  • Direct Admission - A direct admission means direct admission TO medicine physician service but for some reason parked in your hospital ER before going to a ward bed. These patients are NOT admitted under a ER physician service prior to being accepted to medicine service.

• the date & time arrived in med ward bed from the unit log or nurses note.

TMP file entry

• PROJECT:
  • ER_Wait
• ITEM:
  • ER admit ( if coming from own hospital ER)
  • Direct admit (if coming from other location, facility or hospital and not your own hospital ER, ward, ICU)
• Column E: Date (arrived on ward bed)
• Column M: time (arrived to ward bed)
• Column Q: 'Parked in ER' if Direct admit

• The Item label, in TMP, for this project would prefer it to be changed to: ward arrival rather than ER admit. This is more intuitive label.-Trish Ostryzniuk 18:23, 2015 December 8 (CST)
  • We can still use the 'ER Admit' under item but change the definition - see above change. JMojica 14:20, 2015 December 10 (CST)

Collection Parameters

• Start and stop date
  • Start Date: June 4, 2011
  • Stop Date: none
• Data is sent when complete and upon final check.
• Data is saved in L_TmpV2 under Project 'ER_Wait' of the centralized_data.mdb
• Prior ER Wait data
  • From Sept 1, 2007 to June 3, 2011, ER wait is under the Project 'Moves' (Moves for Medicine).
  • Note that the collection guideline of the Project 'Moves' is different from the Project ER_Wait.

Reporting and Analysis

• ER Wait is calculated as the difference between the Arrival in Ward Date_time - Admit Date_Time
• The SAS Program to read the data is in X:\Julie\SAS_CFE\CFE_macros\CFE_ERWait.sas

Template:Data Integrity Checks

ER Wait and from-ER consistency

• uses the following queries
  • s_tmp_ER_Wait_has_tmp_not_from_ER - error if ER wait entry but is not from ER
  • s_tmp_ER_Wait_from_ER_no_ER_Wait - error if from ER but has no ER wait entry
  • s_tmp_ER_Wait_chronological - error if tmp date/time is null or is <= admit date/time
  • s_tmp_ER_Wait_long_delay - gives error if delay is > 3 days

Data Structure

We capture ER Wait (moves) in L_TmpV2. The data is sent to and stored in TmpV2_1.mdb.