AHRQ's Quality & Patient Safety Programs by Setting: Emergency Department

Emergency Severity Index (ESI): A Triage Tool for Emergency Department Care, Version 4 is a five-level emergency department (ED) triage algorithm that provides clinically relevant stratification of patients into five groups from 1 (most urgent) to 5 (least urgent) on the basis of acuity and resource needs.

Improving Patient Flow and Reducing Emergency Department Crowding: A Guide for Hospitals presents step-by-step instructions for planning and implementing patient flow improvement strategies to alleviate crowded emergency departments.

Sepsis Telehealth Project & Toolkit is a guide to train rural emergency department (ED) clinicians on how to integrate remote intensive care unit (ICU) staff into the workflow for the purpose of treating patients with severe sepsis and septic shock. The toolkit could be used to integrate remote staff into any healthcare setting and applied to other medical conditions.

The Uncertainty Communication Toolkit gives healthcare providers a standardized approach to establish competency in communication of diagnostic uncertainty with patients being discharged from the emergency department. The toolkit materials have been created to run simulation-based training to teach emergency medicine physicians to achieve competency on the Uncertainty Communication Checklist. They include clinical scenarios for simulation sessions, standardized patient and emergency medicine physician simulation case instructions, training videos, and feedback exemplar videos. The toolkit also includes an interactive module for physicians in training. The toolkit was developed through a rigorously conducted randomized trial.