INTRODUCTION Our goal was to evaluate patients' threshold for waiting in an emergency department (ED) waiting room before leaving without being seen (LWBS). We analyzed whether willingness to wait was influenced by perceived illness severity, age, race, triage acuity level, or insurance status. METHODS We conducted this survey-based study from March to July 2010 at an urban academic medical c...

Prolonged wait times at the emergency department (ED) are associated with increased morbidity and mortality, and decreased patient satisfaction. Reducing wait times at the ED is challenging. The objective of this study is to determine if the implementation of a series of interventions would help decrease the wait time to consultation (WTC) for patients at the ED within 6 months. Interventions i...

The expression goes that we should learn from our mistakes. Well, here is an opportunity for us to learn from our success. The development and implementation of information technology (IT) for use in healthcare is a challenging pursuit. Projects that fail, particularly if they are funded by government, can be intensely criticized by the Auditor General, opposition parties and/or the news media....

This document describes an algorithm for processing incoming SYN segments that allows higher connection-establishment rates between any two TCP endpoints when a TCP Timestamps option is present in the incoming SYN segment. This document only modifies processing of SYN segments received for connections in the TIME-WAIT state; processing in all other states is unchanged. Information about the cur...

The first set of evidence-based benchmarks for medically acceptable wait times, announced in December 2005, were developed, in part, through a novel partnership between the Provincial and Territorial Ministries of Health, the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) and Canada's health services research community. Responding to a direct request for assistance and demanding timelines from t...

Snap-shot mechanisms are used to read a globally consistent set of variable values. Such a mechanism can be used to solve a variety of communication and synchronization problems, including system monitoring and control of real-time applications. Methods based on locking (e.g. using semaphores) are penalized by blocking, which typically leads to difficulties in guaranteeing deadlines of high pri...

Computational grids provide users with many possible places to execute their applications. We wish to help users select where to run their applications by providing predictions of the execution times of applications on space shared parallel computers and predictions of when scheduling systems for such parallel computers will start applications. Our predictions are based on instance based learni...