Emergency departments face many operational challenges that have only been compounded by the COVID-19 pandemic. Many teams lack the data and analytic support to build appropriate action plans, exposing complex and related problems that leave many departments without a clear path forward. Technology can help drive needed changes in the ED. Innovative technology that goes beyond the usual analytics and dashboards and effectively leverages clinical data can help leaders improve operations and outcomes.
During a webinar hosted by Becker's Hospital Review and sponsored by TeamHealth, Matthew Ledges, MD, vice president of clinical analytics, and Wilfredo Rivera, MD, MBA, regional clinical analytics director — both of TeamHealth — demonstrated the company's proprietary Cognition technology platform and shared insights into how this platform can help reshape ED operations and solve common, but vexing, challenges.
Four key takeaways were:
- Emergency department teams are facing historic challenges. Unprecedented staffing shortages and unusually low morale, combined with more typical ED challenges — like varying and hard-to-predict volumes and patient acuity, longer lengths of stay and increasing hold times — have made smooth ED operations harder than ever to achieve. In light of these challenges, ED leaders are looking for actionable and data-driven solutions to improve throughput, productivity and overall performance.
- To drive effective change, leaders need a clear view into all of the interdependent issues that affect the ED. TeamHealth's advanced, integrated clinical analytics platform, Cognition, combines historical data with predictive analytics to provide timely, relevant and contextualized data. This clinical data combined with advanced analysis allows quick diagnosis of operational problems like throughput. "It's a very powerful kind of mathematical equation behind the platform, but it's very user friendly," Dr. Rivera said.
- Cognition has multiple modules that leverage collective data to help improve care. Cognition can help model demand ebbs and flows, forecast productivity and throughput and enable facilities to compare themselves to peers using parameters that match them up against similar facilities. Cognition also offers unique benchmarking: "Unlike traditional benchmark reports that only differentiate emergency departments by hospital type or large volume bands, Cognition uses volume and acuity as independent variables to create custom benchmarks that are unique to every emergency department," Dr. Ledges said. With an emphasis on continual improvement, the modules receive regular enhancements to provide cutting-edge technology and drive change.
- The Cognition platform is designed to invite analysis. By inviting analysis, rather than issuing directives, Cognition helps involve ED leaders in decisions, enhancing collaboration and ensuring implantation of facility-specific strategies. "Instead of me giving the facility director or the director of nursing the results, like, this is the schedule that you should do, I would like for them to be able to look at this and say, 'Ok, so how do I make this better?'" Dr. Rivera said.
An integrated platform – like TeamHealth’s Cognition – that emphasizes the importance of collective data, learning from others and the balance between simplicity and ownership will help drive adoption of technology solutions. To learn more about TeamHealth’s Cognition, click here.
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