Developing an emergency department order set to treat acute pain in sickle cell disease.

STUDY OBJECTIVE: Patients with sickle cell disease (SCD) have many emergency department visits because of painful vaso-occlusive episodes (VOE). Guidelines recommend treatment within 30 minutes of triage, but this is rarely achieved in clinical practice. Our goal was to develop an order set that is being implemented in the ED to facilitate and standardize emergency care for SCD patients in acute pain from VOEs presenting to the emergency department (ED) in New York City (NYC). METHODS: Using a RAND/University of California, Los Angeles modified Delphi panel, we convened a multidisciplinary panel and reviewed evidence on how to best manage SCD pain in the ED. Panelists collaboratively developed then rated 202 items that could be included in an ED order set. RESULTS: A consensus order set, a practical how-to guide for managing SCD pain in the ED, was developed based on items that received high median ratings. CONCLUSIONS: The management of acute pain experienced during VOEs is critical to patients with SCD; ED order sets, such as this one, can help standardize pain management, including at triage, evaluation, discharge, and follow-up care. After implementation in NYC EDs, studies to examine changes in quality care metrics (eg, wait times, readmissions) are planned.

A structured approach to transforming a large public hospital emergency department via lean methodologies.

Emergency Departments (EDs) face significant challenges in providing efficient, quality, safe, cost-effective care. Lean methodologies are a proposed framework to redesign ED practices and processes to meet these challenges. We outline a systematic way that lean principles can be applied across the entire ED patient experience to transform a high volume ED in a safety net hospital. We review the change in ED performance metrics prior to and after lean implementation. We discuss critical insights and key lessons learned from our lean transformation to date. The steps to implementing lean principles across the patient's ED experience are described with specific attention to executive planning of rapid improvement experiments and the subsequent roll-out of lean transformation over an 18-month time frame. Basic ED performance data were compared to the year prior. Results of the exploratory analysis (using median and interquartile ranges and nonparametric tests for group comparisons) have shown improvement in several performance metrics after initiating lean transformation. The approach, lessons learned, and early data of our transformation can provide critical insights for EDs seeking to incorporate continuous improvement strategies. Key lessons and unique challenges encountered in safety net hospitals are discussed.