Patient Flow Software Blog

What Are They and How Can You Navigate Them?

Is setting standards and measuring your patient placement performance a top priority? If you

work in hospital administration, we bet (and hope!) your answer is a confident “Yes.”

As you know, the goal for efficient patient placement is to reduce or eliminate delays in transferring patients from clinical intake areas, such as the ED and PACU, to nursing unit beds, thus improving medical care (by avoiding extended stays in the ED beds or in the hall in a nursing unit) for the patients and freeing up needed beds in the ED.

But there are challenges that have to be overcome in order to meet this goal. First, there must be easy access to real-time operating data about patients and beds for clinical and bed access staffs throughout the process. Second, management must make decisions as to how to handle several difficult issues that arise during the process, and those decisions are better made with real-time data. And third, management must also find a way to accurately measure the performance of clinical and bed access staffs in completing their segments of the process.

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:

Are You Meeting or Missing the Mark?

Now, according to research provided by PriceWaterhouseCoopers, there is no denying that hospitals are influenced by the growing popularity of online ratings and reviews.

Healthcare Business Tech weighed in on this fairly recent trend, stating, “With the rise of the Internet and social media, today’s customers are more savvy with all their purchases-and have higher expectations. Health care is no different.”

So, what does a review-savvy patient mean for our readers in the healthcare industry? It means that the patient experience, from the moment they walk up to the front desk to the moment they exit the hospital, is now, more than ever, a vital part of your hospital’s success and survival. Having tools in place to create a smooth, efficient patient experience could be the difference between a poor or a positive rating.

A PFS original interview with Peter Van de Kerkhove, one of the industry’s leading innovators

Peter Van de Kerkhove is a man with a mission. A mission to provide hospitals with astandardized approach for coordinating and managing Patient Transport activities, using technology.

In fact, he’s had this mission for over 25 years, beginning with his job as a Project Manager for Process Improvement, working for a 900-bed medical center, in the Department of Operations (workflow) Analysis. It was in this position that Peter discovered he had a passion for Patient Transport and made it his personal mission to see it improved.

Today, he is seeing that mission realized as over 50 hospitals have benefited from his innovative breakthrough in transport technology, including those served by PFS, as he is one of our co-founders and a continued consultant.

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.