If your patient transportation goal is to deliver patients
to their appointments on
time at the lowest personnel cost, you will want information that helps you to know when trips should be dispatched and how to measure employee productivity. Appropriate benchmarking plays a key role in that process.
Industrial Engineering Principles
PTS uses industrial engineering principles to identify a "standard trip duration" between all nursing units, diagnostic departments, clinical areas, the transport office, equipment pick-up and return areas, and discharge locations. These time studies are modified by such things as:
- Equipment drag factors
- Patient prep at the unit
- Patient loading and unloading
- Elevator access times
With a unique "standard trip duration" for each trip in a specific hospital, a suggested dispatch time will be calculated so that the patient will reach the destination at the scheduled appointment time. Or, an appointment time will be created for an unscheduled trip based on the dispatch time.
With Patient Transport Benchmarking you are now able to make some key measurements, such as dispatch variance, trip duration variance, on time trip completion, and the efficiency of each transporter.
The inability to dispatch on time and deliver patients on time can be caused by low employee productivity or by insufficient staff to handle the volume of trips. Only a careful measurement of productivity by comparing actual performance against internal standards will allow you to determine the real cause.
