It’s a little more insightful than my cynical title indicates, but it is, essentially an article that tries to quantify what we already know – blood tests, MRI, and CT all add to ED length-of-stay.
While the article isn’t specifically earthshaking, it interests me in the context of patient flow through the Emergency Department and the utilization of finite ED resources. Every ED has a waiting room – and, if you’re like me, sometimes you look at the board and there are 34 waiting – on a good day. In that sense, one becomes acutely aware of the value of space in the ED with which to evaluate new patients. If blood tests and imaging tests are adding over an hour to ED LOS for each of your bed, then it would seem prudent to minimize those tests whenever possible. It might also, perhaps, even be feasible to consider “standard of care” to be a malleable concept based on a need to ration testing specifically to increase patient flow, balancing the risks of diagnostic uncertainty against the risks of prolonged waiting room times.
Just brought to mind some interesting issues.
“Effect of Testing and Treatment on Emergency Department Length of Stay Using a National Database”
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22594356