Holding daily briefings where care teams can exchange information helped significantly reduce the length of a patient's stay, according to a study published in The Journal of the American Osteopathic Association.
Researchers examined lengths of stay for 1,683 chronic obstructive pulmonary disease patients at two community hospitals within the Cleveland-based University Hospitals network. One hospital implemented daily integrated care conferences, where representatives from each faction of the patient's multidisciplinary care team met to discuss the patient's progress. The other hospital did not implement daily integrated care conferences.
The study shows that the average length of stay for chronic obstructive pulmonary disease patients at the hospital with daily team briefings was 3.37 days versus 5.55 days in the hospital without them.
At the hospital with daily team briefings, patients between the ages of 40 and 69 years had a hospital stay that was 67 percent shorter than patients in the same age range at the hospital.