Patient coordination in emergency departments using visualization of operation behavior

It is challenging to get an overview and understanding of the activities and their relations at an emergency department (ED). This is due to the complicated relations among activities called operations in this paper and the always changing system behavior. This paper presents a method to represent and visualize operations during the actual work at the ED that enables flexibility during modeling and actual care. By specifying operation behavior using only execution restrictions in transition conditions for each operation instead of fixed sequences, the method and related visualization tool can describe the ever changing and complex ED flows. Using the proposed approach, the ED staff will therefore have the possibility to in a better way coordinate the operations due to the increased overview.