Patient Flow Software Blog

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.

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.