Amy Christenbury, MHA, ATC, is the project coordinator for nursing, finance and resource management at RUMC, and Shonda Morrow, RS, RN, JD, is the director of nursing resource management. Together with Michael Gallup, president and COO of TeleTracking Technologies, the women discussed how their medical systems identified procedural waste and used technology to improve it.
Rush’s TeleTracking system analyzes data to provide patient-centered solutions to improve health system functions. Rush recently used the data to improve its bed management, thus streamlining admissions and discharges.
Ms. Christenbury and Ms. Morrow presented tips for other health systems to reduce waste by data tracking.
1. Look at how operations are defined. If all staff members are not defining processes the same way, behaviors can be inconsistent in how to obtain goals. By clearly defining processes, all clinical staff members can be on the same page in obtaining hospital department efficiencies.
For example, with bed management, all nursing staff needed to understand the hospital’s core philosophy of how to place patients so all subsequent nurses would understand the thought process behind the placement, Ms. Christenbury said.
2. Get everyone on board. The strengths of different hospital disciplines need to be brought to the table to institute any process changes, Ms. Morrow said. “You have to have collaborative partners,” she said. “They have to embrace and accept the art of change — waste not, want not.”
Gathering and analyzing metrics in real time helps everyone involved understand the root causes of waste and acknowledge that processes have to change, she said.
3. Use technology to make all tasks more efficient. Ms. Morrow and Ms. Christenbury’s team realized the clinical units were not using technology to its full ability. By using TeleTracking’s capabilities, Rush nursing staff members could notify one another quickly with text messages and reduce the time calls back and forth can take up. An auto paging system also helped speed up the transition of patients from the operating room to the post-anesthesia care unit and avoided moving patients before PACU space opened up.
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