Expanding the Capacity to Care™ Beyond the Four Walls of the Health System
Now more than ever, Health Systems face historic staffing shortages, capacity constraints, and unsustainable financial pressures that are forcing leaders to find new ways of improving operational management using communication, automation, as well as data and analytics to connect disconnected care settings.
With the shift from individual, independent hospitals to health systems came the demand for system-wide visibility to capacity, centralized placement capabilities, and the need for better data, analytics, and benchmarking. Now, as TeleTracking moves beyond the health system to true market networks, the need for that visibility and data to scale across disparate health information systems, especially EMRs, is paramount.
Having Operational Interoperability across owned, affiliated, and non-affiliated care entities alike — including acute, ambulatory, post-acute, home health, and more — fosters expanded partnerships and relational growth opportunities, creating a true healthcare ecosystem. This means thinking not just about the patients’ acute care stay and the bed they occupy, but how they interact with the system throughout their entire care journey. By creating shared visibility into capacity, Health Systems can maintain and grow market share and “flatten the care continuum,” a practice that creates seamless transitions between stages of care.
To accomplish this, Health Systems are adopting ‘Boundaryless Healthcare™’ — an operating model facilitated by data in the Healthcare Operations Cloud™ — that allows them to look beyond the four walls of their health system to work more collaboratively by creating shared situational awareness to capacity, referral patterns, and patient demand. Boundaryless Healthcare can play a key role in improving visibility between facilities and care settings by helping each location understand where patients come from and where they are going. This helps rural and tertiary facilities alike by facilitating creative partnerships that allow them to efficiently use all the available beds across the system when physical and staffed capacity is limited.
Moving beyond traditional bed management, Health Systems are now leveraging TeleTracking’s integrated operations platform and Boundaryless Healthcare to complement the capabilities of the EMR by creating true operational interoperability, improving operations, workflow, communication, and capacity management. This reimagining of healthcare operations, with true data interoperability, means providers are able to expand the capacity to care by optimizing access to care, streamlining care delivery, and connecting transitions of care. With Boundaryless Healthcare, Health Systems can:
- Provide rural hospitals with the referral tools they need to get patients to the right care setting faster and more efficiently.
- Enable “Hospital-at-Home” or “Advanced Care-to-Home” visibility to keep patients where they’re most comfortable while maintaining regulatory compliance.
- Create virtual beds/units to expand capacity while caring for patients not occupying a physical bed.
- Develop new collaboration opportunities with community facilities and load-balance patients across the network.
