Main entrance to Lehigh Valley Hospital-Cedar Crest, part of the Lehigh Valley Health Network.
The Lehigh Valley Health Network is using uses a a real-time digital dashboard that gathers information from the EHR system to help streamline patient flow and identify areas of congestion, reports FierceHealthcare and Hospitals & Health Networks.
In the past, the Pennsylvania system used a whiteboard to manually gather and transmit patient-throughput data to more than 30 administrators across several departments. But a collaboration with Epic has digitized that.
Fierce reports: “The dashboard collects and displays data on emergency department census and operating volume along with average transport and room cleaning times., Each morning 30-40 administrators from various departments across the system meet (“huddle”) to review the metrics and identify and fix specific clogs as patients make their way through the system, like reallocating environmental services staff during peak discharge hours to turn over rooms faster.
“Increasingly, hospitals are using analytics to improve throughput and drill down into specific management solutions. Similarly, hospitals are spending more money on technology to manage revenue, but most aren’t realizing the full potential of those systems, in part because they can’t keep up with EHR upgrades.”
H&HN reports:
“Now the dashboard collates easily digested tables and graphs of key throughput indicators, including overall hospital and emergency department census and anticipated operating room and post-anesthesia care unit volume for the day. The dashboard also displays discharge orders before 11 a.m., average transport times and room cleaning times from the day before.
“Participants in the huddle are the leaders who can effect change… .The group includes the directors of all the clinical units, hospitalists, and representatives from pharmacy, respiratory, nursing, the ED, perioperative areas, environmental services, transport, and administrative and physician leadership.”
To read the H&HN report, please hit this link.
To read the Fierce report, please hit this link.
