Hospitals that have had the most success alleviating emergency department (ED) crowding are those that have recognized the hospital-wide nature of patient flow problems and designed initiatives to move admitted patients out of the ED more efficiently, note the authors of this editorial. They assert that the problem of crowded EDs is driven by delays in moving admitted patients to staffed inpatient hospital beds.
Many stakeholders in the emergency care system are calling for the end of inpatient boarding in the ED. The Institute of Medicine, for example, has recommended that hospitals and the regulatory bodies that govern them end the practice. The key challenge now is to make this recommendation a reality.