The client was a hospital which wanted to see how they could create bed capacity within their adult inpatient and surgical units to take on additional case volume.
They also wanted to ensure they would be able to maintain their high standards for patient care and employee satisfaction.
The project was designed to create ‘Safe Patient Flow’ with the focus of putting the right patient, in the right bed, the first time.
Key Changes included:
- Schedules were developed and/or enhanced to help managers balance resources with fluctuating time of day volumes
- Execution Controls were developed to allow managers to monitor and prioritize assignments for both clinical and non-clinical managers.
- Daily Operational Reports were designed with a balanced set of operational performance indicators to provide hospital management visibility of actual vs. planned performance.
The Results
The project was successful, allowing the client to take on additional volume.
Specific results include:
- Average length of stay decreased from 5.2 days to 4.9 days
- Length of Stay in the ED for patients being admitted for an inpatient stay improved by 25 min
- Percent Discharges by 11AM increased by 6% going from 12% to 18%
- Median Time of Discharge was improved by 20 minutes
- PACU length of stay decreased by approximately 17 minutes and the percentage of red phones was decreased by 8%
- Bed turnaround time was decreased by 35 minutes for priority 1 bed assignments
