Enhancing Emergency Department Management: A Data-Driven Approach to Detect and Predict Surge Persistence

The prediction of patient attendance in emergency departments (ED) is crucial for effective healthcare planning and resource allocation. This paper proposes an early warning system that can detect emerging trends in ED attendance, offering timely alerts for proactive operational planning. Over 13 years of historical ED attendance data (from January 2010 till December 2022) with 1,700,887 data points were used to develop and validate: (1) a Seasonal Autoregressive Integrated Moving Average with eXogenous factors (SARIMAX) forecasting model; (2) an Exponentially Weighted Moving Average (EWMA) surge prediction model, and (3) a trend persistence prediction model. Drift detection was achieved with the EWMA control chart, and the slopes of a kernel-regressed ED attendance curve were used to train various machine learning (ML) models to predict trend persistence. The EWMA control chart effectively detected significant COVID-19 events in Singapore. The surge prediction model generated preemptive signals on changes in the trends of ED attendance over the COVID-19 pandemic period from January 2020 until December 2022. The persistence of novel trends was further estimated using the trend persistence model, with a mean absolute error of 7.54 (95% CI: 6.77–8.79) days. This study advanced emergency healthcare management by introducing a proactive surge detection framework, which is vital for bolstering the preparedness and agility of emergency departments amid unforeseen health crises.