Matching capacity to demand: a regional dashboard reduces ambulance avoidance and improves accessibility of receiving hospitals.

Objectives: ambulance diversion is a dangerous repercussion of emergency department (ED) crowding and can reflect fragmentation and a lack of coordination in designating optimal patient offload sites for prehospital providers. The objective of this study was to evaluate whether proactive destination selection through the Regional Emergency Patient Access and Coordination (REPAC) program would enhance capacity and ED flow management.

Methods: the REPAC system provides a dashboard that synthesizes real-time capacity and acuity data for all three adult EDs in the city of Calgary, assigning a color code to reflect receiving status.