Americans rely on emergency departments (EDs) to play a critical role in the health care safety net. But while the number of ED visits climbed significantly, the number of EDs dropped from 5,000 to 4,000 from 1991 to 2006. This synthesis examines the evidence on who uses EDs, the causes and consequences of overcrowding, and the cost of providing care in the ED. Key findings include: privately i...

Headache is the fourth most common reason for adult patients to present to the emergency department. Approximately two-thirds of these visits are for primary headache disorders, such as migraine, cluster, and tensiontype headache. When evaluating a patient with headache in the emergency department, the physician must fi rst decide if the headache represents a primary headache disorder or whethe...

The greatest advances in medicine over the next two decades will result from application of the tools and principles of informatics to the problems of clinical medicine. New developments in medical informatics will drive advances in clinical care administration, research, and education. Information flow in the emergency department a decade hence will be characterized by a transformation from a ...

OBJECTIVE One of the most important and basic variables in emergency department (ED) operations is patient visit volumes. This variable is usually predicted on the basis of the average ED patient visit volume over a certain period. However, ED patient visit variability is poorly understood. Therefore, we evaluated ED patient visit variability in order to determine if the average can be used to ...

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BACKGROUND Emergency department access block is a growing problem in emergency departments across Canada. Access block is defined as hospital occupancy >85% causing emergency department overcrowding. Hospital overcrowding leads to prolonged emergency department wait times, and delays in the transfer of admitted patients from the emergency department to inpatient beds. The relationship between e...