Developing Emergency Room Key Performance Indicators: What to Measure Mohamed KHALIFA a,1 and Ibrahim ZABANI a a King Faisal Specialist Hospital and Research Center, Jeddah, Saudi Arabia Abstract. Emergency Room (ER) performance has been a timely topic for both healthcare practitioners and researchers. King Faisal Specialist Hospital and Research Center, Saudi Arabia worked on developing a comprehensive set of KPIs to monitor, evaluate and improve the performance of the ER. A combined approach using quantitative and qualitative methods was used to collect and analyze the data. 34 KPIs were developed and sorted into the three components of the ER patient flow model; input, throughput and output. Input indicators included number and acuity of ER patients, patients leaving without being seen and revisit rates. Throughput indicators included number of active ER beds, ratio of ER patients to ER staff and the length of stay including waiting time and treatment time. The turnaround time of supportive services, such as lab, radiology and medications, were also included. Output indicators include boarding time and available hospital beds, ICU beds and patients waiting for admission. Keywords. Emergency Room, Performance Indicators, Improvement, Hospitals. Introduction Emergency room (ER) crowding and inefficient performance has become a major barrier to receiving timely emergency care. Patients who visit ER often face long waiting times to be treated and might wait longer to be admitted [1]. One conceptual model partitions ER crowding into three interdependent components: input, throughput, and output [2]. Input factors reflect sources of patient inflow, throughput factors reflect bottlenecks and slow processes within the ER and output factors reflect bottlenecks in other parts of the health care system, such as availability of hospital inpatient beds for admission [3].A thorough understanding of quality improvement principles and benchmarking is now necessary for providing patient centered care, improving customer satisfaction, and evaluating services performance. Emergency professionals now are asked to provide safe, timely, efficient, and cost-effective care. There is still a gap in developing and utilizing indicators to measure and control ER performance [4]. Some healthcare managers have the experience and skills of introducing new strategies and innovating new operating processes to achieve breakthrough performance, but they continue to use the same old or nonspecific indicators they have been used for years [5]. It is very essential to ask what to measure exactly and why should we measure it; so as to develop indicators that reflect the actual performance of healthcare organizations [6]. 1 Corresponding Author. Consultant, Medical Informatics, Email: dr.m.khalifa@gmail.com. and Why Should We Measure It? Unifying the Applications and Foundations of Biomedical and Health Informatics J. Mantas et al. (Eds.) IOS Press, 2016 © 2016 The authors and IOS Press. All rights reserved. doi:10.3233/978-1-61499-664-4-179 179