If you plug the search term "patient access" into Google Trends, the system will generate a graph that looks like a hockey stick. In a sense, the uptick in searches for the term patient access also correlates with TeleTracking's 25-year journey as a patient flow solutions organization, says Kris Kaneta, vice president of marketing for the company. There is a slow rise for decades and then a sharper increase as hospitals and health systems began to focus on driving value by improving the patient experience.
"When TeleTracking started 25 years ago, the whole notion of patient flow as a concept didn't really exist," Mr. Kaneta says. "In the first part of the 2000s, [healthcare research firm] KLAS assessed a category called 'bed management,' which didn't become 'patient flow' until 2011."
TeleTracking has secured the No. 1 position in KLAS' patient flow category in the five years since its inception. But Mr. Kaneta sees the organization's most important accomplishment is contributing to a healthcare environment where the concept of patient flow is more visible. It may not have broad impact yet, but providers are beginning to understand the important role that flow plays in patient experience, caregiver experience and a host of other factors.
In early February, NewYork-Presbyterian launched its PatientPlacementOperationsCenter, a command center-style hub designed in partnership with TeleTracking to streamline patient flow. Initiatives like this one quickly produce results that show the benefits health systems can experience from better managing patient flow, says Mike Gallup, president of TeleTracking.
"How do you create highly reliable organizations? You do so by creating command centers that are able to respond in real time to issues and failures," Mr. Gallup says. "This is really about the patient experience, and managing that is a big deal for such a massive, university-based hospital system. It's not easy but [NewYork-Presbyterian] is doing it because they don't want their patients waiting to get into the facility. Twenty-four hours, 12 hours — even eight hours — is too long to wait for care."
NYP's command center will run all patient throughput through a centralized location, Mr. Gallup says, creating a system that will help eliminate wait times and delayed care.
"When I think of something that people overlook, it's the fact that flow is more than just having a set of beds and pushing more patients through them," Mr. Gallup says. "Flow is actually about a patient experience that starts outside of a hospital."
A RAND study published in TeleTracking's Patient Flow Quarterly outlined how higher efficiency generated by better throughput management can result in million dollar savings, according to Mr. Gallup. By implementing a command center in which operations are centrally controlled, staff are able to give detailed accounts of patient information to both off-site physicians and caregivers they may be coordinating with, creating what Mr. Gallup sees as a trend toward highly reliable organizations within healthcare.
Current standards for highly reliable organizations come from industries like air traffic control and nuclear power, where precise practices that took decades to develop run like clockwork to consistently produce near-perfect results. Mr. Gallup envisions leveraging centralized command centers in hospitals to achieve this same level of efficiency and accountability in healthcare.
"It's going to become an absolute necessity to have a command center where you can see and manage everything going on within your operation," Mr. Gallup says. "Everything from patient access to what's going on in ambulatory clinics, to discharge and post-acute care in a single platform — that's what we're building."
Mr. Kaneta sees the Google Trend search as representative not only of a growing interest in patient access and its implications, but as a marker of a time when providers started to look at healthcare differently.
"I think we'll look back in 10 years at 2015 and 2016 as the time when we hit the apex of really understanding the significance that patient flow plays in relation to patient access, throughput, operational efficiency, productivity and the patient experience," he says. "It has significant implications for all of those things and, at the end of the day, to delivering the best patient care."