Desiree Einsweiler, CEO of the Palo Alto County Health System based in Emmetsburg, Iowa, shared three tools hospitals can use to streamline patient flow and enhance efficiencies at the Becker’s Hospital Review 6th Annual Meeting in Chicago May 8.
Some strategies provider organizations can use include continuous quality improvement, Six Sigma, SBAR, multi-disciplinary teams and lean strategies.
Some lean strategies Palo Alto County Health System has used to improve patient flow and handoff include:
1. Value-stream mapping. Mapping out an organization’s care process, including the steps the healthcare workers and patients take, and comparing it to the organization’s ideal care-process map can help identify areas of opportunity for improvement and create an action plan.
“Once we went through and identified our areas of opportunity, we did a rating process that looked at what improvements would be easiest versus most difficult and what would be the most costly versus changes that would cost virtually nothing at all,” said Ms. Einsweiler.
2. Level-loaded scheduling. This tactic is really about building a schedule to match patient visits and is, according to Ms. Einsweiler, “very much a manufacturing ideal similar to producing products in a certain sequence to maximize efficiency and yet still be in demand.”
Level-loaded schedules can reduce patient lead time, improve patient satisfaction, maximize volume to meet patient access demand and simplify the provider’s day. To build schedules using this model, an organization should collect data on patient volume and visit types, categorize the visit types into different time blocks and create a schedule that matches the breakdown of visits.
3. 3P facility design. For hospitals or other provider organizations look to construct a new facility or renovate an existing building, utilizing lean’s 3P facility design principles of people, preparation and process can be immensely helpful.
“Basically, what 3P means is, before we started construction, we built a life-size replica of the new areas out of cardboard and trialed the areas out with staff, providers and patients to get input and ensure we weren’t going to build a facility that wasn’t going to work as we had planned.”
Using 3P allowed the health system to engage their staff members in the facility design and save money by identifying potential facility issues before the construction process began.
