Application of time series analysis in modelling and forecasting emergency department visits in a medical centre in Southern Taiwan.

ABSTRACT:

Objective

Emergency department (ED) overcrowding is acknowledged as an increasingly important issue worldwide. Hospital managers are increasingly paying attention to ED crowding in order to provide higher quality medical services to patients. One of the crucial elements for a good management strategy is demand forecasting. Our study sought to construct an adequate model and to forecast monthly ED visits.

Methods

We retrospectively gathered monthly ED visits from January 2009 to December 2016 to carry out a time series autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) analysis. Initial development of the model was based on past ED visits from 2009 to 2016. A best-fit model was further employed to forecast the monthly data of ED visits for the next year (2016). Finally, we eval

SUBMITTER: Juang WC 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5719313 | biostudies-literature | 2017 Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature