The emergency department at AdventHealth East Orlando developed a patient intake technique to streamline care and ensure patients are seen more quickly, which is now being used across the health system's eight hospital-based emergency departments, according to an Oct. 25 news release.
Bed Traffic Control is the name of the method, which prioritizes assigning one employee to oversee communication with everyone who is sending or bringing a patient into the ER.
One individual overseeing a series of computer systems, phone calls, chats and monitoring, along with communication about ER patient movements streamlines the process of patients being moved into beds more quickly than other methods, the release explains.
"It helps our team know immediately where that patient is going (and) they're going to have a bed immediately…It's kind of like the ground traffic controllers at an airport," Shelby Mills, BSN, RN, a senior nurse manager at AdventHealth Orlando stated in the release. "They're directing where all the planes are going, where they are landing and what gates they're going to go to, and it's a very similar concept that we use here."