Health systems nationwide are grappling with the same operational challenge: hospitals running at or near capacity while patients remain admitted longer than medically necessary because care transitions can take too long.
During a recent conversation hosted by Becker’s Healthcare, leaders from Boston Medical Center and Qventus discussed how the academic safety-net system used AI-powered automation to transform discharge planning, reduce excess inpatient days and unlock new capacity without adding beds or staff.
Christopher Manasseh, MD, associate chief medical officer of inpatient operations at Boston Medical Center, and Jason Cohen, MD, chief medical officer of inpatient at Qventus, shared how the health system redesigned its operational workflows over a six-year partnership with predictive analytics embedded directly into the EHR.
Here are four key takeaways from the discussion.
1. What was missing
Boston Medical Center had tried to standardize multidisciplinary rounds for years. The efforts never stuck. What the organization lacked wasn’t intention, it was a consistent process and a tool that busy care teams would actually use.
“What we needed was something that everybody could adopt, ideally a tool that would help us establish a workflow that could be followed,” Dr. Manasseh said.
That lesson shaped how the partnership with Qventus was built: around a standardized script, clear role expectations and a workflow that worked the same way across all 18 service lines.
2. Driving adoption
An earlier version of the Qventus solution lived outside the EHR. Executives liked the outcomes, but frontline teams found the extra system easy to skip. Here, the most important takeaway was that if care teams have to leave their existing workflow to use a tool, they won’t consistently use it.
Today, the platform lives entirely inside Epic, populating estimated discharge dates, care milestones and barrier flags directly within the clinician’s normal view. Case managers, nurses and physicians see the same information without opening a separate system.
“You have to make it live and breathe in their daily work for it to be sustainable, scalable and deliver consistent outcomes,” Dr. Cohen said.
The shift made a visible difference. Dr. Manasseh described rounding recently with a resident team and finding them already focused on estimated discharge dates, barriers and disposition plans.
“The way they presented really to me is a testimony to the fact that people got it, they got the message,” Dr. Manasseh shared.
3. Change management matters
Technology alone didn’t move the needle. Boston Medical Center paired its new tools with consistent leadership reinforcement, rounding on units weekly, sharing participation data with department chairs monthly and setting explicit expectations for attendance at multidisciplinary rounds.
Critically, leaders also listened. Feedback from residents led to changes in round timing and structure. Quarterly “lunch and learn” sessions kept teams aligned on shared definitions, like what it actually means for a patient to be medically ready for discharge.
Once teams saw that a delay of care, or delivering the right test at the right time, directly affected patients, engagement followed. “Once we were able to communicate that clearly and effectively, and it took time, but it really helped us achieve the engagement,” Dr. Manasseh said.
4. Looking to the future
Since implementing the system, Boston Medical Center has eliminated more than 3,200 excess inpatient days, supported 1,157 additional admissions and grown discharge volumes by roughly 25%. In 2025 alone, the hospital achieved an 18% reduction in mean excess days while increasing discharge volume by 8.6%.
A recent poll of webinar attendees found that more than 75% were not confident their current technology would meaningfully reduce excess days in the next 12 months. Boston Medical Center’s experience suggests the gap between where most hospitals are and where they could be remains significant and closable.
“We were able to do it without adding new beds, adding headcount, and improved our efficiency overall,” Dr. Manasseh said.
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