Application of the promethee II method in overcoming the bottleneck problem in an emergency department

Abstract

Emergency department (ED) is a primary healthcare department and a key component of the whole healthcare system. The original mission of ED is to primarily handle only emergent situations. However, ED visits include a wide range of illnesses and injuries that is truly emergencies, urgent, semi-urgent, and non-urgent cases.As a result of this, EDs are overcrowded and the length of stay (LOS) of patients has increased, whereas quality of service has decreased. The decision maker (DM) should analyze and eliminate this problem in order to allocate and optimize the hospital resources more efficiently. This work discusses the application of PROMETHEE II method in solving the bottleneck problem in an ED. PROMETHEE II is a prominent method for multi criteria decision aid (MCDA) that builds a complete ranking on a set of potential actions. Microsoft Excel 2010 and Visual PROMETHEE software are used to implement the method. The emergency department in Hospital Universiti Sains Malaysia, Kubang Krian is taken as the case study in our work. The result shows that improve the time taken to deliver test result ranked first in improving the patient flow and the most sensitive criterion are to reduce the hospital infections.