Benchmarking: A Case Study: Changes In The Emergency Department

Case Study
A 26-year-old woman went to the emergency department complaining of shortness of breath over the previous three days that had increased in intensity (Nash & Goldfarb, 2006). The patient was at the hospital for over three hours before she was able to see a physician. The physician did a complete exam and ordered blood tests, a chest x-ray, lung scan and electrocardiogram.The patient waited for three more hours before the physician told her that he believed she had asthma and should follow up with her primary care physician. The physician also prescribed a bronchodilator.
In the time prior to this patient’s visit, the hospital had experienced a decrease with patient satisfaction, an increase in patients leaving prior to being fully evaluated, and an incident where a patient fell in the crowded waiting room. The hospital administrator wanted to make changes in the emergency department to address the issue of excessive wait times. The
Benchmarking, the process of identifying, learning, and adapting outstanding practices and processes from another organization to help improve performance, is important within an organization to assess strengths and weaknesses and to determine where changes can be made to benefit the organization (Roberts, 2008). By benchmarking, the hospital may be able to determine that other hospitals have completed registeration in the examination areas and moved triage to the waiting room and this decreased wait times or that providing a greeter to establish contact with every patient upon entering the emergency department and providing a sign with approximate wait times improved the patient’s level of satisfaction. Additional steps that the hospital may take to improve quality is establishing a regular benchmarking schedule, expanding areas benchmarked, and benchmarking against present and future