Handheld computer application for time-motion studies in the emergency department.

Urban academic emergency departments face significant challenges of increasing patient volumes and sicker patients. Better understanding of the timing and interactions between provider activities may assist in efforts directed toward improving patient-care processes to decrease length of stay. Rapidly chang-ing and overlapping activities in the emergency department make time-motion study difficult. This poster describes a handheld computer application that enables synchronized capture of task description and times across multiple patient care providers in the emergency department.