BlogThe Power To Ask "What If" In Bed Planning An example of optimizations could deal with patient discharge management. Hospitals discharge the patients at different times of the day. Hospitals have no easy way of knowing when beds are unoccupied and are available for the next patient. Hospital beds that stay unoccupied but could have been used to care for the next patient in the waiting room, directly affect patient care and the hospital's performance.
Currently many hospitals use various means of communication like phone calls, emails, faxes and texts to communicate bed availability among many departments that are scattered in different physical locations. Knowing when a bed is available is critical in maintaining optimal functionality and efficiency, as well as standards of patient care. The "discharge to bed available" time varies dramatically and it affects the patient flow and bed availability. This is top concern for all hospitals. Taking a siloed approach to bed management does not work, it needs to look at the system as a whole.
Tracking ADT acknowledgments and patient flow statistics in the ExtraHop Web UI
Urgent Need For Every Hospital The Bundled Payments for Care Improvement (BPCI) initiative is defined as the reimbursement of health care providers such as hospitals and physicians on the basis of expected costs for clinically defined episodes of care that involve an inpatient hospital stay. As hospitals increasingly lose patients to medical care delivered in clinics and home settings, hospital are escalating their efforts to effectively manage bed capacity. Hospitals are operating with fewer beds or closing outright, to make way for new ambulatory care centers. Low occupancy rate makes hospitals the high cost provider, which is not sustainable or competitive. Empty beds have a direct financial and performance impact on the hospitals. This makes it urgent for every hospital to find a reliable, efficient and effective way to keep track of bed availability to manage the patient flow.
Hopefully it's obvious by now that there are a host of reasons that hospitals need to be very efficient in managing patient flow and bed availability. Hospitals are in need of a solution that provides hospitals the bed availability information as the patients are discharged.
Recent Trend Seen With Many Hospitals Many hospitals like Johns Hopkins, Rush University Medical Center in Chicago, and others in may locations both domestic and international are already implementing the Centralized IT Operations Data Center. These hospitals are finding huge cost savings and higher patient satisfaction.
HL7 Analytics For Business Intelligence And Clinical Informatics Hospitals and other healthcare provider organizations can have many different healthcare systems from many different vendors used for everything from patient admissions, discharges, orders, observations, billing records to patient tracking. Systems communicate with each other when they receive new information, or when they wish to retrieve information using HL7 Version 2.x (where x can be 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 or 7) messages.
HL7 data is crucial to the healthcare industry. The ability to extract meaningful insights from HL7 messages in real-time, from many different sources is crucial. Healthcare data comes from various sources like the EMR (electronic medical records - patient centric data), EHR (electronic health records - broader healthcare dataset), patient monitoring systems, laboratory systems, imaging systems, administrative data or other sources. Hospitals need a platform that can see all healthcare HL7 data that is generated by various sources and gain insights for business intelligence and clinical informatics.
How ExtraHop Can Help The extensibility of the ExtraHop platform makes it simple to parse the HL7 data real-time in a vendor agnostic manner to create a lot of actionable information to speed up the patient flow, bed availability and lot more. HL7 messages can be used to generate real-time data regarding bed availability based on patient admit date and time, discharge date and time, room, bed, facility, patient status and much more since HL7 messages are used by majority of the healthcare systems. ExtraHop platform is fully capable of performing the analytics for business intelligence and clinical informatics. ExtraHop truly belongs in the the hospital command center!
For additional information about Hospitals Command Center, Patient Flow and Bed Availability check out these links:
