Ochsner Emergency Department Overcrowding Scale (OEDOCS): predicting Emergency Department crowding among diverse academic hospital settings.

We developed the Ochsner Emergency Department Overcrowding Scale (OEDOCS) to help us measure and respond to crowding among diverse-sized Emergency Departments (ED) within our network. Not satisfied with our current Emergency Department (ED) crowding score, we first surveyed our ED staff to report perceived crowding and then developed models to predict perceived crowding from our Electronic Health Record (EHR) data. Staff at two ED locations, one large and one small, were asked to report a perceived crowding level between 0-200 every four hours for over 3 months. In addition, we collected Electronic Health Record (EHR) data during the same period. Next, we investigated models for predicting perceived crowding. Linear regression performed the best with an RMSE of 41.77 and 41.98% RMSE improvement over our previous crowding score. We have made OEDOCS publicly available.