Patient Flow Best Practices
Best Practices for the Joint Commission's Patient Flow Standard Compliance
With The Joint Commission’s patient flow leadership standard, LD.3.15 surfacing on the radar screen of hospital executives, the need to ensure that they have policies, processes and procedures to address patient flow and safety issues in place, is never more apparent.
Improve Your Patient Flow - How Transport Services play a Critical Role in Managing Hospital Capacity.
A Best Practice outlining how the integration of TransportTracking™ with the Bed Management Suite™ increases patient through-put. Utilizing patient transport personnel for every patient transfer or discharge is a critical element in ensuring real-time notification of bed availability and improving patient through-put.
Patient Flow White Papers
University of Alabama at Birmingham Hospital - Patient Progression Initiative
In an era of decreasing revenue reimbursement and rising human labor costs that often result in decreased capital funds it is critical for healthcare organizations to identify opportunities which would enhance processes and technology, as well as improve the effectiveness of current operations to increase capacity without a significant drain on capital. The University of Alabama at Birmingham Hospital (UABH), Birmingham, Alabama, an internationally renowned academic medical center in the southeast United States, recognized and heeded the urgent call to improve daily operations directly related to patient throughput to yield increased capacity.In collaboration with Stockamp and Associates, Inc., an assessment of operations and capacity statistics was completed as part of the Patient Progression initiative and a proposal submitted that UABH could increase patient capacity by four percent (4%) without submitting a Certificate of Need (CON) application for additional beds. It was determined, fairly quickly, that the most benefit to be gained existed in the processes surrounding patient flow through the system, beginning with the management of one of our most valued assets, inpatient beds. The initiative comprised of the creative implementation of technology, an electronic bedboard, coupled with enhanced processes and team collaboration from physicians, nursing services, environmental services, patient accommodations, and patient escort that would aid in more efficient management of the current complement of 908 licensed beds.
For complete study, click here (PDF format)>
Patient Flow Case Study and ROI Analysis: Maximizing Throughput and Capacity
OSF Saint Francis Medical Center, the 710-bed flagship of the Order of St. Francis (OSF) Health System in Peoria, Illinois, realizes big returns with automated patient flow management.America's hospitals are increasingly plagued with bottlenecks, not only in the emergency departments, but throughout their facilities. It's a crisis that is placing patients' lives at risk and annually costing billions in lost revenue.
The problem has prompted The Joint Commission to issue recent standards holding hospital administrators accountable for improving patient flow conditions at their institutions.
Technology is providing an answer for those institutions willing to invest in the solution. And the return on that investment (ROI) is becoming quite clear. OSF Saint Francis Medical Center in Peoria, Illinois has already seen significant process improvements and ROI since implementing an automated suite of solutions from TeleTracking Technologies, Inc. To objectively quantify and substantiate these benefits, Maestro Strategies LLC, an Atlanta, Georgia-based management consulting firm, was retained to conduct an independent third party Return-On-Investment (ROI) analysis and validation for OSF Saint Francis.
The analysis revealed over 180% Internal Rate of Return (IRR) each of three years studied.
For complete study, click here (PDF format)>
Maximizing Hospital Capacity - Increasing Patient Through-Put by Improving the Patient Flow Continuum
After a ten-year process during which hospitals moved to reduce capacity via consolidations, bed reclassifications, and some hospital closures, we are nearing a national capacity crisis. Combined with the increasing population growth, especially within the "baby boomer" segment, this situation becomes even more critical. The implications of not capitalizing on the unused capacity causes backlogs throughout the hospital, including the Emergency Department (ED), Post-Anesthesia Care Unit (PACU) and by extension the Surgical Suite. Bottlenecks in these critical areas often lead to unacceptably long wait times in the ED, diversions to competitors’ hospitals, surgical delays, and avoidable overtime within the peri-operative services.With the inter-departmental nature of the patient flow continuum, it is no longer possible to study and improve processes within a departmental "silo". It comes as no surprise, therefore, that to effectively improve a hospital's ability to address Capacity Management, the process of managing the supply and demand for beds, it must be elevated to that of of a mission critical item near or at the top of, many health executives’ agendas.
The following paper can help Hospitals increase their understanding of how to manage capacity by improving patient flow.
Cost Justification for BedTracking®
Clean beds at hospitals are a hot commodity. STAT cleaning calls and bed batching are a matter of course, and bed readiness information is not readily available.ADT vs. BedTracking®: A One-Day Comparison
No Admit-Discharge-Transfer (ADT) system on the market can page a Housekeeper to clean a bed or page a Supervisor if the Housekeeper fails to start the bed. Nor can any ADT provide a real-time update of when bed cleaning begins, a real-time update of when bed cleaning is finished or real-time status updates from any telephone.