Providing timely and effective care in the emergency department (ED) requires the management of individual patients as well as the flow and demands of the entire department. Strategic changes to work processes, such as adding a flow coordination nurse or a physician in triage, have demonstrated improvements in throughput times. However, such global strategic changes do not address the real-time, often opportunistic workflow decisions of individual clinicians in the ED. We believe that real-time representation of the status of the entire emergency department and each patient within it through information visualizations will better support clinical decision-making in-the-moment and provide for rapid intervention to improve ED flow. This notion is based on previous work where we found that clinicians' workflow decisions were often based on an in-the-moment local perspective, rather than a global perspective. Here, we discuss the challenges of designing and implementing visualizations for ED through a discussion of the development of our prototype Throughput Dashboard and the potential it holds for supporting real-time decision-making.

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