Abstract
Many emergency departments (EDs) compare themselves to national productivity benchmarks, such as the average patients/hour or relative value units (RVUs)/hour. Making these comparisons does not provide a tool to determine which processes need improvement, most urgently, within the ED to improve efficiency. Furthermore, there has been no clear means to determine how to set reasonable goals based on the capabilities of the particular ED under study. Determining the power of a process is a tool that can provide the ED with these missing pieces of information.