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Study: Streamlined ED triage program cuts wait times

Quality Improvement Monitor, August 25, 2005

An urban ED cut wait times by nearly 30 minutes with an improved registration and triage process, a new study found.

ED REACT, or Rapid Entry and Accelerated Care at Triage, slashed wait times by 24 minutes and a length of stay in the ED by 31 minutes, according to the study, published in the August 19 Annals of Emergency Medicine. The process begins tests and interventions before patients move to ED beds.

The hope of the program is to reduce the rate of patients who leave the ED without being seen, which are higher than 5% in as many as 7% of the nation's EDs, Modern Healthcare reported.

"Patients who leave emergency departments before they are seen by a physician represent a failure in the healthcare safety net," Theodore Chan, MD, an emergency medicine physician at the San Diego Medical Center and lead author of the study, told Modern Healthcare.

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