Baptist Memorial Health Care recently celebrated the one-year anniversary of its centralized patient placement center.
A tremendous amount of work went into achieving that milestone: coordination between multiple locations, engaging physicians, collaborating with IT and training not only frontline clinicians but staff within patient placement, patient transport and EVS. Central to Baptist’s success is leadership that engages employees at all levels, and that’s where Derick B. Ziegler, Vice President of Regional Operations, comes in.
“Clearly, there’s no question that strong senior leadership is paramount to a successful implementation of this magnitude, especially when you’re talking about changing the culture of an organization,” says Ziegler. “Unfortunately, it doesn’t happen overnight and you can’t just wave a magic wand.”
Baptist had experience with large-scale IT implementations, having recently installed Epic as its EHR to help manage clinical information. Yet health system leaders realized they still needed a solution to manage patient flow.
“TeleTracking drives the enterprise solution for patient movement, which allows us to accept and retain patients within the system, predict and manage not only work but staff too, reduce patient wait times, etc”, says Ziegler. “We had an aggressive timeline for our TeleTracking implementation, and the operational integration has gone well to date. We’re looking forward to greater integration between Epic and TeleTracking when we upgrade in the fall. We believe this will further optimize the patient experience and elevate the transparency of real-time information for safe and effective patient flow.”
The implementation process started with a strategic planning and goalsetting process headed by Baptist’s CEO. One success factor was growing volume, both inpatient and outpatient, within the 14-hospital system and determining the tools that could be leveraged to make that happen. Senior leaders knew that they were not keeping patients within the Baptist system and in many cases were sending them to the competition.
To read more about Baptist Memorial Health Care's success, click here.
[Editor's Note: This article is part of TeleTracking's Patient Flow Quarterly magazine.]