Putting Emergency Room Patients on the Fast Track
- Setting up a fast track area with four patient rooms at the front of the department
- Agreeing to use standardized criteria for triage
- Keeping patients in treatment rooms only while being treated; waiting occurs in the fast track waiting area
What can your team do to identify areas that need improvement? What else could your team do to shorten the time patients have to wait for service?
At Sunnyside Medical Center in the Northwest, patients with minor injuries were waiting up to three hours for care—well above national wait time benchmarks. The UBT standardized criteria for triage and set up a fast track area at the front of the department. Patients use treatment rooms only while being treated; waiting occurs in the fast track waiting area. The team improved service scores, and after four months the length of stay was reduced from 162 minutes to the team’s target of 90 minutes.
When patients with minor injuries were waiting up to three hours for care, this emergency room team knew something had to change. Team members created a fast track area and triage process that brought their service scores up and length of stay down.
With fast track, patients with issues that are not life threatening can be seen quickly and separately from the rest of the ED population
Average length of stay for emergency room “fast track” patients dropped 50 percent in a half a year's time