Tripledemic is coming. Here are some tips for keeping your ED moving (please add more in the comments!)

1) Dispo is King. Often when many patients are waiting to be seen, it’s tempting to sign up for several more. But nothing slows down the ED more than not having rooms available, so remember to make dispo rounds and get patients either sent home or admitted

2) Order stuff from triage – either assign someone to screen and order or empower your nurses to initiate certain orders

3) Before ordering anything, ask yourself, “Does the patient really need that?” Example: flu or RSV test when the answer wouldn’t change your other work-up or treatment

4) Identify the bottleneck. Sometimes, you are shorter on nurses than anything else, and if you really want to keep the ED flowing, doctors will have to pitch in and escort a patient to xray or hand the patient a urine collection cup

5) Buff up your EHR templates, auto-text, and other shortcuts to charting now. Do it on less busy overnight shifts. Do you find yourself typing the same medical decision-making for minor closed head injury where no CT was done over and over? Do it once, select, save as auto-text or dot-phrase, and repeat repeat repeat for all your commonly used text