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Introduction Quality healthcare is in every citizen’s best interest. Emergency rooms nationwide are currently overburdened, in part due to a rising percentage of our nation’s population choosing to use Emergency Room (ER) care for less-than-urgent care needs to the detriment of other patients with legitimate ER requirements. Our task has been to determine a good solution using a stratified approach to problem solving. Before we present the fix we’ve come up with, it’s best to quantify the nature of the problem. Nature of the Problem Figure 1 shows statistics for the year 2000, detailing the percent distribution of ER visits by immediacy. The data is staggering. Urgent and Emergent care accounted for less than half of the total care volume. Clearly, a lion-share of ER patrons are there with less-than-urgent care needs. The other half fall into this grouping, and our concern is that non-urgent patient care requirements are decreasing the quality and availability of ER care for legitimate ER patients. Current trends make the situation more peculiar – emergent care need patients (people legitimately needing ER care) are visiting the ER less frequently.
Approximate Word count = 667
Approximate Pages = 2.7
(250 words per page double spaced)
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