With hundreds of installations in hospitals throughout North America and around the world, Connexall is a proven solution in the healthcare space. Our team – in product development, sales, support, and operations – brings years of experience and a deep understanding of hospital processes and workflows, and their underlying business needs. Through that experience, and in our conversations with dozens of executives, we have identified a series of common issues and challenges that all hospitals face in cutting costs, driving revenues, and increasing patient throughput, without sacrificing quality of care and patient satisfaction.
Emergency Departments (EDs) can be the source of up to 80% of hospital admissions, while at the same time treating and releasing hundreds of patients a day. The ED presents one of the greatest opportunities for additional revenue and cost savings implementing workflow and process improvements.
ED backlogs in the United States
Many Emergency Departments face a severely reduced patient flow that can result from incremental patient backlogs accumulated during peak times. Patients referred to an ED may chose to admit themselves to an alternate location if they are not admitted in a timely manner. Unfortunately, patients and EMS diversion to other hospitals can cost time-strapped organizations approximately $12,000 per hour in lost revenue, and consistent admissions delays may negatively impact a hospital ED reputation, reducing the number of referrals. Finding ways to prevent this backlog represents a key solution to many major ED problems: enhanced patient flow dramatically improves patient care and process outcomes throughout the ED.
A common myth about ED backlogs
ED delays are often blamed on a shortage of hospital beds, however, in our experience and conversations with hospital staff and executives, we have found that only approximately 20% of ED patients are admitted to inpatient beds, while the remaining 80% are seen and leave without a bed assignment. This suggests that bed capacity is probably not the major issue behind overcrowding, diversions, and lengthy wait times.
Current approaches to solving ED backlogs
While most improvement initiatives aim to admit patients faster and prevent boarding in the ED, the benefits seen are usually marginal this only seems to benefit ED patient flow marginally, and entails costly propositions like observation units, rapid admit units, more telemetry beds and cancelling of elective surgeries and admissions.
Using information immediacy to eliminate bottlenecks
As discussed above, patient flow in operationally-efficient departments is not dependant on hospital bed capacity. Most successful strategies to reduce bottlenecks accept current capacity as a given, and assume that efficiencies will have to be found using current space, staff, and infrastructure. The best strategies leverage opportunities to create smarter processes and support systems that the ED itself can influence with fewer incidents of missed communication or human error.
The most successful ED’s – in fact, the most successful businesses and departments in any industry – optimize their operational capabilities by automating repetitive tasks, which allows staff to focus directly on those issues that cannot be automated and require human intervention. In ED settings, this means freeing up clinicians to focus on direct caregiver support to patients. Instead of merely reengineering overcomplicated processes, successful hospitals are creating new solutions that emphasize patient quality of care in through the creation of an entirely new system format rather than through the reengineering of previously flawed processes.
When we provide a solution for ED, we focus on multiple patient flow bottlenecks virtually every hospital faces: between the waiting room and the ER, and between the ER and inpatient units. Connexall ensures that every request is acknowledged with a timely response, and data reporting capabilities offer management the right information to make improvements to staff scheduling or device reliability. By enhancing communications and enabling information immediacy, you know exactly which hospital beds are available and which units are accepting patients. Triage notification, rapid ER bed turnover, and rapid service management can all be managed more easily by Connexall. Abnormal test results and the outcomes of patient consults can be communicated immediately, with no unnecessary waiting. A major Canadian hospital reduced average length of stay in the ER by 17% after implementing a Connexall ER and bed status solution. Connexall dramatically improves asset utilization, which frees up functional capacity to address an ED’s primary challenge variability.
