Ascension—How a Health System Command Center is Touching the Patient Experience at Every Point on the Continuum of Care

Ascension is the nation’s largest national Catholic health organization with several systems in each state. St. Vincent Health in Indiana is comprised of 17 hospitals and recently launched the One Ascension project to centralize patient placement across those hospitals.  Chris Wagoner, RN, BM, BSN, CPHQ

Regional Director, Clinical Service Line for Ascension Connect shares how their team worked to combine support folks, clinicians and the IT department in order to streamline processes to work for the benefit of their patients.

What You’ll Learn in Today’s Episode:

• Ascension had a Transfer Center in place, along with their physicians’ answering service, physician practice office scheduling, a consumer care line, a regional resource team and remote patient monitoring. These entities were spread across Indiana so the first step in the Health System Command Center journey involved figuring out the synergies between these different groups.
• The implementation started with their largest, most complex facility, ensuring that every aspect of the technology, including Capacity Management Suite, was being fully utilized.
• Unit performance is shared at a monthly throughput meeting and metrics are also shared with the executive team on a daily basis.
• Executives were highly supportive of the initiative since it was helping “shorten the distance” between hospitals, bringing them under one roof and making them feel like one health system rather than a bunch of hospitals. The over-arching goal was to get the right patient in the right bed, at the right time, at the right facility.
• An initial challenge—and eventual success—involved the silos between the different departments. Now everyone from the CNO to the transporters knows how the system works and the role they play in order to make everything work successfully.