What is Red Priority

Cognitive theories on decision making show that individuals often do not decide in a full and rational way; they instead use cognitive strategies that allow them to overcome the limitations imposed by their limited rationality and the difficulties derived from uncertainty. In this context, this chapter aims to analyze the impact on operations caused by decisions taken by healthcare professionals in an emergency department when influenced by heuristics. Therefore, a systematic review of the literature for extracting the heuristics of healthcare professionals and a non-systematic review for constructing the theoretical framework about operations management, health operations management, hospital organizations, and heuristics were performed. Thus, having also described the object of study, the analytical model could be built. Then, three approaches were proposed for the synthesis, and deployment proposals were exposed for each.