“Optimizing patient flow throughout the hospital is essential to ensuring safe, high-quality, patient-centered care. Providing timely access to appropriate care and optimizing hospital flow are both critical levers to increasing value for patients, clinicians, and health care systems.
Conversely, poorly managed hospital-wide patient flow has critical implications for both patients and providers. Delays in treatment and failing to provide the right care, in the right place, at the right time puts patients at risk for potential harm and less than optimal care. It also increases the burden on clinicians and accelerates burnout.
Many recognize that diversions, long waits, and delays in the emergency department (ED) are a hospital-wide issue, not solely an ED issue. Waits are often the result of ED beds being occupied by patients waiting for admission to the hospital. Lack of inpatient capacity also results in patients being ‘boarded’ in the post-anesthesia care unit (PACU) and often managed on ‘off service’ units.
Yet, while many understand the problem, they don’t often have the strategies needed to address hospital-wide patient flow.”
In the preceding excerpt from a recent Institute for Healthcare Improvement promotional piece for its Hospital Flow Professional Development Program (http://bit.ly/2khoDM9), the call for “strategies needed to address hospital-wide patient flow,” can be satisfied by an IT solution compliant with the Cloud Healthcare Appliance Real-Time Solution as a Service reference architecture (CHARTSaaS RA). The CHARTSaaS enables any authorized administrative or clinical healthcare delivery subject matter expert (SME) to create an information technology (IT) application a.k.a. “app” that would be accessible to any authorized user anywhere via his/her mobile digital device. Such an app could monitor hospital patient flow, apprise staff automatically of pending bed backlogs and recommend real-time tactical alternatives to the boarding of patients in off-service units. They could do this with minimal cost and complexity, and with no dependence on provider organization IT staff or systems.
Please validate the foregoing CHARTSaaS RA-related propositions to your own satisfaction by reading the white paper at http://bit.ly/2vmK1Rx, viewing the tutorials posted on YouTube (http://bit.ly/2sVajvS and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f5OtbCCDNLs) and also by reviewing the details of CHARTSaaS™ and the CHARTSaaS RA™ in these presentations:
Healthcare providers will benefit significantly from appreciating and then applying a CHARTSaaS RA-compliant IT solution. To do so will mitigate medical mistakes (currently the third leading cause of patient deaths. per Makaray and Daniel (http://bit.ly/1rtW6Sa); thereby minimizing patient adverse events and optimizing clinical case outcomes while maximizing the cost-effectiveness of care and treatment, and also accelerating the accrual and facilitating the application of medical knowledge.