Optimizing patient flow and capacity is one of the most important strategic priorities for healthcare organizations, due to its impact on case volume, provision of high-quality care and revenues.
During a March Becker’s Hospital Review webinar sponsored by LeanTaaS, two leaders at Sarasota Memorial Health Care System (Fla.) — Susan Grimwood, DNP, APRN, executive director of logistics and patient throughput, and Kathy LeFrancois, BSN, CNML, director of patient flow and nursing resources — discussed how adopting LeanTaaS’ patient flow optimization technology helped the organization improve capacity.
Four key insights were:
- Sarasota Memorial was struggling to reach peak capacity. In the 2015-16 and 2017-18 fiscal years, this two-hospital health system realized it had a serious capacity problem. At peak census, its number of occupied licensed beds inched dangerously close to its number of functional beds, which is an indicator of how many patients the system can safely care for.
We had a low average daily census but a pretty high peak census,” Ms. Grimwood said. This led to boarding issues, causing the hospitals to divert patients, while also experiencing routine delays in patient discharge due to inefficiencies. “We had a burning platform and had to figure out what to do when capacity is at max.”
- Redesigning patient flow with advanced analytics and automation improves capacity across the hospital. Team members identified four key areas on which to focus: intra-unit patient flow, outpatient flow, surgical services flow and ED flow. The inefficiencies in those areas were not due to any lack of effort but from people not working together collectively, Ms. Grimwood said.
To address those challenges, the organization stood up a 24/7/365 logistics center to provide better coordination. Sarasota Memorial also partnered with LeanTaaS to implement iQueue for Operating Rooms (2017) to improve surgical block utilization and management, and iQueue for Inpatient Flow for better census predictions (2019) and patient flow (2020).
- AI-powered discharge optimization garners impressive results. One focus area was expediting patient discharge, which affects patient flow in all other areas. By improving discharge, the impact was felt across the organization.
After implementing iQueue, improvements at Sarasota Memorial included a 13-hour decrease in average length of stay, a 32% decrease in ED boarding hours, a 10% decrease in discharge processing time and 40% of patient discharges being completed prior to 1:00 pm.
- iQueue for Inpatient Flow expands to a second site to continue capacity transformation. Sarasota Memorial Hospital-Venice, which opened its doors in 2021, faced similar capacity-related constraints, including high peaks in patient volume that exceeded its licensed bed capacity.
To address this challenge, the Venice hospital replicated the journey of the flagship hospital and implemented iQueue for Inpatient Flow, where it soon saw similar success. Improvements included a 123% achievement of discharge processing time goal and 33% of all Venice patients being discharged before 1:00 pm.
“When our hospital was designed, many common areas were built to grow. So even though we started as a 110-licensed-bed facility, we have plans to keep growing,” Ms. LeFrancois said. “Being able to discharge 30% to 50% of our daily census every day is the only way we have been able to function at this level.”
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