Emergency physicians spend more time caring for patients who prefer a language other than English which may not be accounted for in reimbursement structures.

Background: Emergency departments increasingly serve patients who prefer a language other than English. Honoring patients' language preferences is crucial for quality and cultural appropriateness of care. We sought to assess whether time spent in caring for patients who preferred a language other than English differed from patients whose language preference was English.

A Granular View of Emergency Department Length of Stay: Improving Predictive Power and Extracting Real-Time, Actionable Insights.

Study Objective: Improved understanding of factors affecting prolonged emergency department (ED) length of stay is crucial to improving patient outcomes. Our investigation builds on prior work by considering ED length of stay in operationally distinct time periods and using benchmark and novel machine learning techniques applied only to data that would be available to ED operators in real time.

Methods: This study was a retrospective review of patient visits over 1 year at 2 urban EDs, including 1 academic and 1 academically affiliated ED, and 2 suburban, community EDs.

Factors Associated with Overutilization of Computed Tomography of the Cervical Spine.

Despite the wide availability of clinical decision rules for imaging of the cervical spine after a traumatic injury (eg, NEXUS C-spine rule and Canadian C-spine rule), there is significant overutilization of computed tomography (CT) imaging in patients who are deemed to be at low risk for a clinically significant cervical spine injury by these clinical decision rules. The purpose of this study was to identify the major factors associated with the overuse of CT cervical spine imaging using a logistic regression model. This was a retrospective review of all adult patients who underwent CT cervical spine imaging for evaluation of a traumatic injury at a tertiary academic emergency department (ED) and three affiliate community EDs in January and February 2019.

Operations Factors Associated with Emergency Department Length of Stay: Analysis of a National Operations Database.

Introduction: Prolonged emergency department (ED) length of stay (LOS) has been shown to adversely affect patient care. We sought to determine factors associated with ED LOS via analysis of a large, national, ED operations database.

Methods: We performed retrospective, multivariable, linear regression modeling using the 2019 Emergency Department Benchmarking Alliance survey results to identify associated factors of ED LOS for admitted and discharged patients.

Accuracy of physician self-estimation of time spent during patient care in the emergency department.

Objective: Accurate measurement of physicians' time spent during patient care stands to inform emergency department (ED) improvement efforts. Direct observation is time consuming and cost prohibitive, so we sought to determine if physician self-estimation of time spent during patient care was accurate.

Methods: We performed a prospective, convenience-sample study in which research assistants measured time spent by ED physicians in patient care.