Provider services and solutions

Clinical operations & quality: Patient throughput

The challenge

Admissions are up, patients crowd your ER and you need more capacity. But a troubled economy has put your capital projects on hold. New beds aren’t on the immediate horizon. You can circumvent this conundrum by streamlining patient access and discharge. By using existing resources to overhaul your patient throughput practices and increase patient flow. No small task, especially without compromising quality of care or clinician and patient satisfaction. Or revenue.

Case managers must make sure that patients move efficiently through care delivery from admission to discharge, while vigilantly overseeing and documenting each patient’s clinical needs. Such diligence has taken on crucial importance with the advent of programs that examine claims reimbursements to ensure patients received appropriate care, like Medicare’s Recovery Audit Contractor program. If auditors decide a patient received an inappropriate level of care, they can force the hospital to return reimbursement payments.

How we can help you

• Your ER is a patient’s most common entry point. Yet in the chaos that can reign in ERs, procedures to triage patients and move them efficiently through administrative and clinical care delivery stations—even if initially well-designed—can often be overlooked. We can help you redesign emergency department procedures to improve patient flow from triage to discharge and improve patient tracking and hand-offs.
• Your case managers need to be up to the task of accelerating patient flow and documenting patients’ needs so they can receive appropriate care. We can help you clarify case managers’ roles and responsibilities and help them document patients’ needs to ensure the appropriate level of care based on medical necessity.

Common services include

• Redesigning ER and case management procedures to accelerate patient flow
• Designing a bed management system to reduce long bed waits, position beds efficiently, and ease patient transfers