STUDY OBJECTIVE Massachusetts became the first state in the nation to ban ambulance diversion in 2009. It was feared that the diversion ban would lead to increased emergency department (ED) crowding and ambulance turnaround time. We seek to characterize the effect of a statewide ambulance diversion ban on ED length of stay and ambulance turnaround time at Boston-area EDs. METHODS We conducted...

Current Findings in the Literature: A potential benefit of health IT in inpatient settings is decreased medication turnaround time. Many advocate that electronic processes for medication ordering and pharmacy verification and dispensing are more efficient than paper­based systems because they may be: (1) instantly delivered to the pharmacy as opposed to manually written by the physician, delive...

Current Findings in the Literature: A potential benefit of health IT in inpatient settings is decreased medication turnaround time. Many advocate that electronic processes for medication ordering and pharmacy verification and dispensing are more efficient than paper­based systems because they may be: (1) instantly delivered to the pharmacy as opposed to manually written by the physician, delive...

OBJECTIVE The aims of this study were to describe overcrowding in regional emergency departments in Seoul, Korea and evaluate the effect of crowdedness on ambulance turnaround time. METHODS This study was conducted between January 2010 and December 2010. Patients who were transported by 119-responding ambulances to 28 emergency centers within Seoul were eligible for enrollment. Overcrowding w...

This work proposes a graph mining based approach to mine a taxonomy of events from activities for complex videos which are represented in terms of qualitative spatio-temporal relationships. A Hidden Markov Model to obtain stable qualitative spatial relations from noisy measurements is introduced. The effectiveness of the approach is demonstrated through experimental results for a complex aircra...

In this work, we represent complex video activities as one large activity graph and propose a constraint based graph mining technique to discover a partonomy of classes of subgraphs corresponding to event classes. Events are defined as subgraphs of the activity graph that represent what we regard as interesting interactions, that is, where all objects are actively engaged and are characterized ...

Laboratory turnaround time is considered one of the most important indicators of work efficiency in hospitals, physicians always need timely results to take effective clinical decisions especially in the emergency department where these results can guide physicians whether to admit patients to the hospital, discharge them home or do further investigations. A retrospective data analysis study wa...