One of the outcome measures in the study is the busy period, defined as the time taken to discharge a given number of patients. During the period of study, 19562 busy periods were completed; the busy period duration was 4.97 hours, and involved 7.46 patients.

As an illustrative example, physician Smith is assigned to her first patient (patient 1) at 10 AM on a given day. She then picks up patients 2 and 3, and continues working on all three patients, until the last of these three patients is discharged at 2 PM that day. The busy period associated with these three patients is 4 hours.