Grant: Operating Grant: SPOR iCT Rewarding Success - Development Grants - NL

Overcrowding happens when there are too many patients in the emergency room at the same time. This can cause long wait times and inferior patient care. We are testing a new digital app that will tell doctors and nurses what to do when the emergency room is overcrowded and may save the health system millions of dollars. The app uses data from the emergency room to create a score from 1 to 5 that represents how badly the emergency room is overcrowded (A score of 1 is least severe and a score of 5 is most severe). Using this score, the app tells staff how to get people through the emergency room faster, so they are in the waiting room for less time and reduces the time to be seen by a doctor. We have studied the app before at a hospital in Newfoundland and Labrador (NL) and found that it works well, but we want to know if we can get the same results at another hospital and improve the app by introducing new features. Our study has six steps: 1) Train emergency staff at test site. 2) Make sure the app is working properly and the staff are using it properly. 3) Introduce and test new features to improve the app. 4) Compare the test site to a hospital within the same health region providing care without the app. 5) Analyze the results from step 4. 6) Improve the app using comments from patients and hospital staff. If the app works well at the test site, we plan to deploy the app in hospitals across NL and Canada. This project directly addresses the NL government's priority area of using health information to improve patient health and reduce healthcare spending.