Fewer interruptions, requests that arrive sorted

Staff nurses describe patient call lights as frequent, often non-urgent and hard to triage from the station.^[1] In the emergency department, the most common question from patients and families is how long the wait will be.^[2] Both interrupt care without improving it.

EDFlow answers status and process questions automatically, from the EHR events the department already records, and turns everything else into structured requests the right person can act on.

• Location, initials and age, with names hidden on shared displays and shown on authenticated staff screens when needed.
• Stage and time in stage, compared with the usual time for this step at this hour, so a bottleneck shows before it becomes a complaint.
• Tests as "2 of 4 back", and a clear mark when every result is back and the patient is waiting to be seen again.
• Reassessment due or overdue for patients in the waiting room.
• Requests with a count and the age of the oldest one, and alerts such as "Thinking of leaving" or "Patient is outside the department".

The default order is zone and bed for treatment areas and time waiting for the waiting room. Every column can be sorted and hidden, and the board works as a wall display with larger type and no controls.

Requests arrive grouped by priority (urgent, high, normal, low), then by age. Each shows what the patient asked for, where they are and how long they've been waiting for a response. The age turns amber past the site's target and red past twice the target.

Urgent requests, like "I feel worse", have two answers only: Going now or Can't go. The patient sees "Jordan knows you asked for help" only after someone commits. Low-priority rows can be acknowledged in bulk, and everything works from the keyboard.

When a critical patient pulls the team away, any clerk, triage nurse or nurse can post a delay notice for the waiting patients in the affected zones with one tap. Patients read that someone needs urgent care right now and that their wait may be longer; they never see the code, the patient or the location.

Explaining delays is what moves patient ratings: in a study at triage, patients who were not told about delays were 1.42 to 5.48 times more likely to give lower ratings.^[3]

• Staff sign in with multi-factor authentication; reading a patient's details opens an audited access grant first.
• Visit cards print only at registered stations. Staff screens show a masked visit code, never a usable patient credential.
• The staff companion app runs on hospital-managed devices only.