| Bottleneck | Example of interview data |
| Input | |
| Mornings | ”There is a bottleneck in the morning, which grows until noon.” |
| Boom days | “Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays – early in the week – we are booming, and Fridays – before the weekend.” |
| Throughput | |
| Staff work hours | “It is only to some extent about the number of patients arriving. It is more about the work hours of the staff – about when the physicians leave.” |
| Linear workflows | “You must complete the writing of the record [for your current patient] before you see the next patient […] Then we get linear processes that become longer and longer” |
| Manual data entry | “Manual updating of data is hopeless. Particularly if we say that there may be 100 processes involved in being admitted to hospital. You have to automate as many of them as possible.” |
| Overview of patient progress | “No overview of how far the physicians are in record-writing or in reaching a decision about disposition, or could we potentially have a bottleneck because none of our patients are ready to be transferred to an inpatient ward” |
| Personal competences | “A large bottleneck in relation to the physicians, in getting the junior physicians to see and complete their patients quickly enough” |
| Output | |
| No admissions at night | “We are not allowed to transfer patients [to an inpatient department] between 11 in the evening and 7 in the morning to shield the inpatient departments, and for the sake of the patients.” |
| Scheduling patient transfers | “The inpatient departments create bottlenecks […] There is an agreement that they have one hour from we report a patient for transfer until they report when [they can receive the patient], and that is fluctuating.” |
| Home transports | ”We have patients occupying a bed while waiting for an ambulance to transport them home. The wait should be no longer than 3 hours but sometimes it is 7 hours, if the ambulances are busy driving new patients to the hospital.” |