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: 

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).

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.