Danish emergency medical care is undergoing the largest reorganisation in decades. The number of acute hospitals have been reduced from 40+ to 21 and the new emergency departments which differ in organisation design are being established. The emergency departments play an important role in the planning of future hospitals, including controlling hospital crowding, since up to 70 % of all patients are evaluated in the emergency departments to determine if they can be treated and discharged without further admission. How the differences in organisation impact efficiency, effectiveness, quality of patient care, and resource utilization is unknown. 

The purpose of the Research Network for Organisation Design and Emergency Medicine, DESIGN-EM, is, to bring together state-of-the-art expertise in emergency medicine and quality of patient care with state-of-the-art expertise on how to design effective and efficient organisations on the basis of data analytics combined with innovative developments in software that can support the practical implementation of the research results.

Similar trends and challenges for the emergency departments are seen internationally, and DESIGN-EM therefore includes international and corporate partners with recognised experience in innovative and research-based solutions for healthcare.

The network will offer new knowledge and innovative solutions to the challenges of organising emergency medical care in the face of demographic changes and a demand for reducing healthcare costs. The results contribute to insuring future equal access to high quality patient-centered health care –when it is needed the most in the emergency situation.

DESIGN-EM contributes to optimising Danish healthcare by developing new organisational, technological, and financial solutions making better use of existing resources and ensuring coordination of procedures and services and, for the benefit of patients, employees, as well as collaborative partners and society as a whole.

DESIGN-EM is a cross-disciplinary research network that combines research-based knowledge about optimising organisation design with the emergency medicine field in order to give evidence-based guidelines for designing effective and efficient emergency departments.

The founding partners are Research Center for Emergency Medicine (CfA), Aarhus University Hospital and Interdisciplinary Center for Organisational Architecture (ICOA), Aarhus University.

Organisational efficiency and effectiveness is largely determined by the choice of an organisation design. Organisation design is the design of structures and processes, including, but not exclusively, workflow, use of data and information, incentives structure, and staffing.

Emergency Medicine is concerned with the initial stabilization, management, diagnosis, and disposition of individuals with acute illness and injury. Emergency Medicine encompasses a large amount of general medicine but involves the technical and cognitive aspects of virtually all fields of medicine and surgery. Emergency Medicine is a medical specialty in many countries around the world including Sweden and Finland.