Bed-management visualization software and workflow changes have helped SwedishAmerican Hospital in Illinois significantly cut the time it takes to get patients from the emergency department into a bed and to get outgoing patients discharged.
"We are now able to see bed occupancy rates, identify potential discharges, and figure out what people were waiting for," Chad Thompson, director of emergency services, says in an article at HealthITAnalytics of the software, which is described as "like air traffic control for patients."
Before the implementation, however, the hospital did an in-depth analysis of its processes to determine what needed to change.
"That was an important first step. All too often in healthcare, we buy a program, make it live, and then we find ways to work around it. That's not very effective," Thompon says.
The evaluation began in the medical/surgical unit. Nursing students with stopwatches timed every step in the discharge process. They found it took six hours from the discharge order until the patient went out the door, and four of those hours were unnecessary. It's since set a goal of getting patients discharged in two hours.
Likewise, Health First in Brevard County, Florida, credits bed-management software and Lean principles, which require looking critically at each process, with improvements in three areas: financial, quality scores and patient-satisfaction ratings.
Computer-based decision support also could help improve hospital case- and bed-management efforts, according to a study published at BMC Medical Informatics & Decision Making. And a study in Critical Care Medicine found that provider orders are useful as real-time length-of-stay prediction and patient flow management tools.
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