Patient Flow Software Blog

A recent study of hospital CEOs¹ showed that financial challenges remain their biggest concern. Much of the concern relates to continuing systemic changes resulting from healthcare reform.
The financial benefits derived by the significant increase in insurance coverage of previously uninsured patients is potentially offset by reduced government payment levels under Medicare and Medicaid, pressures to move toward a value-based care model, and collection issues resulting from high deductible insurance plans.
These changing currents emphasize the essential need for hospitals to continually improve the efficiency of their operations. One increasingly important area of operations is the emergency department because of its growing role as the primary entry portal for inpatient treatment, the main source of revenue for most hospitals.
A RAND Corporation study² found that the combined effects of steady growth of ED visits and fewer inpatient beds have caused: 

The Affordable Care Act, commonly known as Obamacare, is a law that, according to the Department of Health and Human Services: “Puts consumers back in charge of their health care… [and] gives the American people the stability and flexibility they need to make informed choices about their health.” Media coverage concerning the ACA has been focused on the effects for consumers, or patients. But, what about hospitals? How will the ACA effect health care providers?
The vision of Bernard Tyson, president and CEO of the Kaiser Permanente Health System, may help shed some light on these questions. According to Tyson, the current goal of health care providers, given the Affordable Care Act, is:

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).

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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.