Empirical Analysis of the Effect Residents Have on Treatment Times in an Emergency Department

David Anderson, John Silberholz, Bruce Golden, Mike Harrington, Jon Mark Hirshon

POMS Annual Meeting, Denver 2013

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Overview

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Broad Healthcare

Landscape

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University of Maryland

Medical Center (UMMC)

Residency Model

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Research Question

What effects do residents have on the efficiency of the emergency department?

- Longer or shorter patient treatment times?

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Residents are in the hospital to learn, but also treat patients

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One conjecture is that the teaching of residents takes time away from patient care and negatively impacts efficiency

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Inconclusive Literature

• Medicare reimbursement rates consider the direct and indirect costs of training residents (Rosko, 1996)
• It has been argued that Medicare reimbursement rates overcompensate for the costs of training residents (Anderson & Lave, 1986; Custer & Wilke, 1991; Rogowski & Newhouse, 1992; Welch, 1987).
• Presence of residents increases faculty staffing requirements - attending physicians are required to spend time supervising and instructing the residents (DeBehnke, 2001)
• Teaching and treatment can occur simultaneously, meaning that residents can help to improve throughput (Knickman et al. 1992)

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Observational Studies

• Residents Slow Down Treament:
• Harvey et al. (2008) – New Zealand resident strike
• Salazar et al. (2001) – Resident strike in the US
• Lammers et al. (2003) – pre-post addition of residents
• Residents Help:
• Theokary et al. (2011) – Residents increase treatment quality
• Blake and Carter (1996) – When residents treat patients they help
• Eappen et al. (2004) – Addition of anesthesiology residents
• Offner et al. (2003) – Addition of trauma residents
• Dowd et al. (2005) – As residents gain experience they increase efficiency�

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Resident Seminars

• Residents absent every Wednesday morning for a seminar
• No replacement workers hired
• Wednesday mornings provide a representative sample of all emergency department activity
• Wide range of arrival rates
• All types of patients and severities
• Congestion levels vary as well

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Advantages Over Previous Studies

• Short-term absence of residents
• No operational changes
• No changes in staffing
• Quick turnover: easy to measure impact

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Data

• Data was provided on 7395 patients
• Information on severity score, number of lab and radiology tests needed, arrival time, treatment time, congestion of the waiting room, and whether or not the patient was admitted to the hospital was given for each patient
• Resident presence was determined based on the time the patient was first treated

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Arrival Rates

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Regression Analysis

• Regressed treatment time on patient and treatment characteristics: Resident absence increases treatment times by almost 8% (exp .075 = .08)

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(Adjusted R2 = .5355, N = 7935)

High Severity vs Low Severity

• Residents might play different roles when treating different types of patients
• Ran regressions on high and low severity patients separately
• Residents have a strong effect on lowering treatment times when treating high severity patients, but no noticeable effect when treating low severity patients

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High Severity Results

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(Adjusted R2 = .5133, N = 7549)

Low Severity Results

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(Adjusted R2 = .5737, N = 341)

Morning Patients

• One possible source of endogeneity is that residents are only absent for patients treated in the morning
• We restrict the data to only those patients who began treatment between 7 am and 1 pm (the time of the seminars on Wednesday)
• Our results still hold

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Morning Results

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(Adjusted R² = .5712, N = 1768)

Survival Analysis

• Instead of measuring treatment times, we can measure discharge rate
• We compare discharge rate on Wednesday mornings to the discharge rate on other weekdays
• A higher discharge rate would imply that residents help to increase throughput

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Survival Analysis Results

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Different Patient Populations

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Residents have a bigger impact on more severe populations

Conclusion

• Contrary to our original intuition, we have shown that residents speed up the treatment of patients in the emergency department
• This effect is especially strong when treating high severity patients
• We recommend that when possible, residents treat high severity patients

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Future Work

• Quantify effect of each additional healthcare worker and compare nurses and nurse practitioners to residents
• Model doctor decisions explicitly, show how they move through ED
• Identify bottlenecks in the system
• Include data gathered in person to help model doctor movement

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