Patient Flow Software Blog

Saving You Money & Time, So You Can Save Lives

Patient care is largely about getting people into the hospital to receive treatment and initiate their recovery process so they can continue healing after discharge. Unfortunately, individualized patient work flows are often interrupted, which has the potential to delay treatments, lower clinical staff efficiencies and extend the length of stay. This is costly to hospitals since labor and space are the top two most expensive resources of a hospital’s budget.

But hospitals equipped with technology used for tracking and optimizing patient and equipment transport, as well as managing housekeeping duties that impact bed availability, have the opportunity to reduce a patient’s length of stay, improve the quality of care, reduce the average cost per procedure, increase bed utilization, and improve patient satisfaction. What could this look like for a medium sized hospital? How about a $34,500 savings for every 50 occupied beds? So, for a hospital that has a census of 150 transportable patients*, we are looking at $100,000 annual savings in clinical labor. Continue reading if you’re interested in why getting from Point A to Point B can be so expensive and how Patient Flow Technology helps that journey run much more smoothly (and cheaply).

Bringing the Whole Picture Into Focus

A True Life Look at Patient Flow Challenges

When the transporter arrived to take Jo Anne’s mother down to X-Ray, she hardly expected him to bring a stretcher, deposit it in front of the elderly woman’s bed and request that she get out of bed and onto the stretcher by herself. There are reasons some patients wear “fall risk” precautionary wristbands and if Jo Anne had not been there to assist her mom onto the stretcher, that precaution could have become a reality.

Unfortunately, this was just the beginning of Jo Anne’s troubles with the patient transport process. When Jo Anne’s mother was brought back to her room on a stretcher, the 2 transporters proceeded to park it outside of her door and she was given the instructions to go ahead and “get back to bed.” Frustrated, Jo Anne asked an administrator, who was making PR rounds, if she could speak with someone from the transport department, but no one ever showed up. Now, anyone even slightly familiar with hospital protocol or the basics of patient transportation will realize that this is not ideal, or even acceptable, transporter behavior.

Making Your Emergency Department Admissions Efficient & Predictable

In our first blog post we promised future entries, and we intend to follow through with this promise, beginning with this next post on Emergency Department admissions and patient placement.

Studies show that between 40 and 60 percent of hospital admissions come through the emergency department, with a similar percentage of hospital revenues being generated from those patients. Now, this is the Emergency Department we’re talking about, so it is easy to assume that these admissions are unscheduled and therefore unable to predict. In actuality, the level of ED admissions can be predicted, but many hospitals remain unequipped to process these admissions efficiently, resulting in interrupted patient flow right at the beginning.

We have compiled some issues that have been reported to us relating to ED admissions that cause frustration for both staff and patients.

• Although the ED has an electronic system to record the admission order, the admitting department only receives a text page, fax, paper printout, or phone call about the admission order. While the admitting staff knows where this patient should go it has limited information as to status and availability of beds resulting in multiple calls with one or more nursing units to update the bed information. That’s a three or four step process, between various departments, for the admission of a single patient.

Comparing Where You Are to Where You Want to Be

Benchmarking - Inpatient transportation managers have a high level of interest in comparing their performance metrics to others to determine how they are doing.

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We have worked with hospitals who experience recurring problems with delivering patients to their diagnostic and treatment appointments on time or who find empty beds sitting up on the floor with no environmental service worker scheduled for cleaning. Sometimes the stories remind us of the above picture.