Projects: Healthcare Management Analytics Lab

The Emergency Department (ED) at University of Chicago Medicine (UCM) is undergoing an organizational transformation to become a leading provider as compared against national performance benchmarks on waiting time and service level metrics. With the recent announcement that they will soon become a Level 1 trauma center serving the South Side of Chicago, the timing couldn’t be better. This project is your opportunity to contribute to the exciting work being done to improve the service of care for 60,000+ patients annually.

According to Medicare’s most recent Hospital Compare statistics, at UCM patients wait, on average, almost an hour before seeing a doctor and almost eight before being admitted. Nearly 9% of patients leave without being seen. In contrast, the national average times are thirty three minutes and 5.6 hours, respectively. Nationally, only about 2% of patients leave the ED without being seen. To become competitive with national benchmarks, in December 2015 the Dr. Admit program was launched, with the aggressive goal to reduce admit time for high-priority patients to under an hour. These patients are selected at triage if hospital admission is predicted to be likely.

In this project, you will evaluate the impact of this new pilot program on time “from door to admission decision,” as well as clinical outcomes such as mortality, length of stay, ED bounce backs, and readmissions. You will isolate effects on both Dr. Admit patients and regular patients, comparing against a retrospective cohort. In the process you will evaluate the accuracy of the current approach to selecting patients into the Dr. Admit program upon triage, and develop a data-driven predictive model to improve selection using both historical medical records and presenting symptoms/observations. Through the project, you will learn the operational details of how world-class ED’s function, and how to use a large patient-level dataset to evaluate and improve performance. Finally, you will develop invaluable skills that will aid you in using data to evaluate similar operational interventions you may encounter in your career.