The referring physician may need to call the hospital on behalf of his or her patient, have someone track down the on-call admitting physician, wait for the physician to return the phone call, discuss the patient and the case with the admitting physician, call the house supervisor to have the patient accepted and then wait for bed availability.
The entire process takes an average of 60 to 90 minutes. Many referring physicians become frustrated and send their patients to the emergency department, wasting both time and resources. In 2009, two physicians frustrated by this lengthy process developed DASH, short for Direct Admit System for Hospitals. Using DASH, the entire admission process is streamlined to produce increased efficiency and time savings by enabling patients to be directly admitted and bypass the ED entirely.
Physicians using DASH can pull up the app on a smartphone or other device and fill out a short form with the patient’s information, and the app transfers the information to the hospital, where it is automatically routed to the referring facility’s preferred on-call physician. There, the admitting physician (or hospitalist) accepts the information, and the house supervisor finds the patient a bed based on the information in the original DASH transmission. The app then creates a hospital “boarding pass” for the patient, or a single document the patient can present upon arrival at the hospital to be placed in his or her bed right away.
The system has been deployed in Gulf Coast hospitals and has seen positive results. “We worked with each hospital facility to tailor the system,” says Dr. Mujtaba Ali-Khan, DO, a hospitalist and one of parent company Streamlined Medical’s founders. “It’s shown to have had a measurable effect on both the occupancy and operating efficiency at these hospitals,” he says.
DASH went live at these hospitals on May 1, 2013, and since then the hospitals have, on average, seen lower wait times for patients, higher occupancies and fewer patient denials. Today, 10 hospitals are using DASH with the goals of achieving an increased referral base, decreased medical utilization, reduced ED crowding and improved patient satisfaction.
These benefits have been seen partly because DASH is designed to be user-friendly. “We paid an immense amount of attention to user experience,” says Streamlined Medical’s CEO Mirza Baig. “We’ve seen adoption [of DASH] by people at referring medical facilities who you would least expect, based on their previous experience with online apps in general and a low incidence of sending patient direct admits to the hospital in the past.”
The simple patient form and the ease of the app helps encourage referring physicians to use the system, which then encourages those physicians to send patients to hospitals using DASH. “Once a medical decision regarding admission is made, referring facilitates have a choice on which hospital they send patients to and which method they use to do it — we want to make it as easy for them as possible to send to [DASH hospitals],” says Mr. Baig.
The DASH system also provides a dashboard analytical tool to allow hospital leaders to track occupancy rates, patient wait times and other important metrics. “Often, hospitals don’t know their direct admit numbers,” says Dr. Khan. “[DASH] can show the impact from direct admitters to help them maximize and grow their market share.”
The company has a goal of expanding their customer base from 10 hospitals to 100 this coming year. “In 2013, we worked on shoring up the product and making sure we could scale it out,” says Mr. Baig. “2014 will be the year of our growth.”
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