Providing optimal access to care via efficient patient flow requires health systems to maximize resource utilization.
Unfortunately, siloed operations across patient placement centers, staffing offices and individual hospitals are creating conflicting operational strategies and perpetuating inefficiency.
During a June Becker's Hospital Review webinar sponsored by LeanTaaS, two LeanTaaS leaders — Bill Griffith, director of operational excellence, and Jason Harber, vice president for client services-inpatient flow — discussed how organizations can improve resource utilization and optimize patient flow by implementing intelligent workflow automation solutions.
Three key insights were:
1. Inefficient patient flow causes staff burnout and limits ability to grow. Excessive patient wait times due to limited visibility into available resources are putting the burden on frontline teams to constantly triage, reprioritize and scramble to provide patient care.
"Patient flow is at the core of financial complications and staff satisfaction issues because it's creating [excessive cognitive and coordination] work every day," Mr. Harber said.
Historical approaches to remedying this problem (e.g., bed management systems, hospital command centers, consulting practices) haven't solved it because they are of limited scope or require significant capital investment or external resources.
2. Solving the problem at the system level requires orchestration of people, processes and technology. LeanTaaS's iQueue for Inpatient Flow solution combines AI technology that predicts patient flow surges, prioritizes discharges and anticipates staffing needs with workflow automation that automatically generates tasks, based on those predictive capabilities. This symbiosis enables an unobtrusive change management approach that simplifies daily work for frontline staff.
For example, if disruptions such as excessive boarding or short staffing are predicted, the platform sends alerts and recommended actions so that issues can be fixed proactively.
The solution's deployment can be tied to each organization's key performance indicators (KPIs). Three common problems for which KPIs are tracked are patient discharge practices, access to bed capacity and managing nursing coverage. iQueue for Inpatient Flow optimizes these areas through three AI-enabled tools, respectively: Discharge Toolkit, Capacity Navigator and Workforce Planner.
3. The journey to patient flow excellence has five key steps. Improving patient flow starts with identifying specific goals and opportunities. LeanTaaS partners with health systems and hospitals to help them pinpoint those objectives and develop a roadmap to achieving them.
"We can start out in different phases, with different groups, with a single hospital or with a single area across multiple hospitals and later expand out to entire systems," Mr. Griffith noted.
Generally, the journey has five key milestones:
- Establishing a governance team, usually composed of the organization's COO, CNO, command center manager, case management lead and IT lead.
- Redefining the role of the command center by making potential adjustments to its structure, staffing and other characteristics.
- Hardwiring capacity management practices by revising and automating protocols.
- Standardizing discharge planning.
- Centralizing staffing across the system.
"If you identify a new opportunity that you want to work on, we figure out what the workflow is going to be and what the current state is, we look at what areas need to improve and how we can automate it and we identify which KPIs we're going to use to track that," Mr. Griffith said.
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