Real-time demand forecasting in the emergency department.

Shifts in the supply of and demand for emergency department (ED) services have led to ED overcrowding and make the efficient allocation of ED resources increasingly important. Reliable means of modeling and forecasting the demand for resources are critical to any ED resource planning strategy. Vector Autoregression (VAR) is a flexible multivariate time-series forecasting methodology that is well suited to modeling demand for resources in the ED.