Emergency Department Discharge Process

A new report from the American Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality outlines a conceptual framework of the emergency department (ED) discharge process and identifies elements of a high-quality discharge process. “Improving the Emergency Department Discharge Process: Environmental Scan Report” identifies best practices, tools, strategies and approaches for addressing problem areas and criteria/outcomes for assessing their effectiveness. Developed by researchers at the Johns Hopkins University Armstrong Institute for Patient Safety and Quality, the report can be used by hospital EDs to identify:

• What constitutes an effective discharge process and what constitutes discharge failures.

• Socioeconomic or medical factors that increase a patient’s risk for a discharge failure.

• Intervention tools or strategies shown to improve the discharge process.

• Screening tools that have been used to predict hospital readmission and ED revisits.      

“Improving the Emergency Department Discharge Process: Environmental Scan Report” 2014