Within a few days about 150 participants have signed up to hear the newest research results from the interdisciplinary research network DESIGN-EM at the conference "Organizational Design of Emergency Departments" arranged in cooperation with the Research Center for Emergency Medicine, AU Health.

2013.11.28 | Pernille Kallehave

Danish emergency medical care is undergoing the largest reorganization in decades. The number of acute hospitals have been reduced from 40+ to 21 and the new emergency departments which differ in organization design are being established.

The emergency departments play an important role in the planning of future hospitals, including controlling hospital crowding, since up to 70% of all patients are evaluated in the emergency departments to determine if they can be treated and discharged without further admission. How the differences in organization impact efficiency, effectiveness, quality of patient care, and resource utilization is unknown. 

The Research Center for Emergency Medicine (CfA), Aarhus University Hospital and Interdisciplinary Center for Organizational Architecture (ICOA), Aarhus University have formed the interdisciplinary research network DESIGN-EM in order to bring together state-of-the-art expertise in emergency medicine and quality of patient care with state-of-the-art expertise on how to design effective and efficient organizations on the basis of data analytics combined with innovative developments in software that can support the practical implementation of the research results.

First research results will be presented

At the conference on December 2, 2013 the first research results of DESIGN-EM will be presented. The researchers are right now mapping the organization design of emergency departments at hospitals in the Central Denmark Region:

”We are doing a comparative case study of five hospitals in the Region. We are surprised that the organization design is even more diverse than we originally anticipated. We are looking forward to discussing this at the conference and hear experiences from the other regions and from abroad,” says professor Børge Obel, Interdisciplinary Center for Organization Architecture (ICOA), BSS who are conducting the research in close cooperation with professor Hans Kirkegaard and  ph.d. student, MD, MBA Anders Møllekær, the Research Center for Emergency Medicine (CfA), Health.

• Read more about the conference in Healths internal calender.
• Read more about Design-EM.