Disruptive innovation has attracted much interest, discussion and argument in academia and industry since it was defined. Based on a review of the related research publications, this paper aims to clarify the concept of disruptive innovation on controversies, summarize ex-ante studies on project management for disruptive product innovation, and propose potential research areas of the disruptive product innovation. The ex-ante studies are classified into three aspects: timing and conditions of disruptive innovation, factors for the implementation of disruptive innovation, forecasting and implementation of disruptive innovation. After a review of the existing methods of disruptive innovation, the potential research of disruptive innovation is presented.

Emergency department (ED) overcrowding is a common issue in emergency medicine of Canada. Previous studies indicate that adding a physician in triage (PIT) can increase accuracy and efficiency in the initial process of patient evaluations. However, the PIT concept should be thoroughly researched before its widespread implementation can be recommended. This paper introduces the evaluation of impact of PIT on ED patient wait times and length of stay (LOS) using simulation modeling. A discrete-event simulation model of ED is built to simulate and predict the effect of PIT intervention. The model performance is validated using current-state ED flow metrics to quantitatively test multiple alternatives for ED improvements. Results show that the PIT implementation can reduce the ED patient LOS by an average of 34% and Waiting to be Seen time by 49% across all scenarios studied. The proposed method can be applied to improve the operation efficiency of healthcare systems in the current pandemic, COVID -19.