In current COVID 19 pandemic situation healthcare leaders are under a lot of pressure to streamline operations to become the low-cost provider, high-quality, now is the time to focus on increase patient flow. Optimizing flow is like a solving difficult puzzle, be it hospital or independent physician’s office. They have to combine different strategies and processes to ensure all staff members in finding the best fit. The result should be efficient operation that should be conductive to improve clinical outcomes, improve patient experience, physician satisfaction with improved safety, reduced care cost and more.
As stay home orders are lifting around the country, providers must find safe ways to integrate non-emergency care and elective procedures into their facilities again.
While it might seem tough to increase patient flow during this pandemic uncertain time, healthcare providers can arrange IoT technologies to improve efficiency in every all departments and prepare for challenges.
What Is Patient Throughput?
Patient throughput allows for the efficient flow of patients through the hospital, ensuring timely and appropriate level of care. Hospitals who have prioritized patient throughput have realized improvements in quality patient care, patient satisfaction, as well as a positive financial impact.
Importance of Increase in Patient Flow
When patient throughput is effective and well-organized, healthcare providers avoid overcrowded departments, care delivery delays, all of which eventually affect a patient’s health, comfort and satisfaction. With an efficient patient workflow, healthcare staff experience a job satisfaction.
By understanding and controlling patient throughput better, hospitals and their patients can expect the following benefits:
- Decreased costs to the health care facility
- Improved staff satisfaction
- Increased productivity
- Reduced wait times
- Improved patient care
In addition to improving current workflow, preparing to open a new facility is a great opportunity to think through strategies and technologies that would address workflow challenges.
Communication
Patient throughput must be addressed on a whole-hospital / practice level. Every part of the hospital or your practice is connected, and the cause of a patient flow issue or bottleneck may occur several steps before its noticeable effect. For instance, a patient flow problem in the inpatient units may be the result of issues with discharge procedures. Therefore, all hospital staff members, including nurses, physicians and administrators, must understand the objective to improve patient flow and the processes required to accomplish related goals.
To get started, the team might draw a patient throughput diagram to map the current design and measure performance. Team members should ask questions such as:
- Are there any bottlenecks with the current patient flow process?
- Are all the steps in the current flow necessary?
- How often do staff members complete each step?
- Can some of the steps be completed at the same time?
- Is there a better way to sequence the steps?
- Can someone with lesser skills perform a certain step?
- What technology can be used to make steps easier?
Culture of Accountability
Everyone must participate and should take responsibility for the facility’s successes and promise to making a positive change. Healthcare providers should clearly communicate expectations and hold everyone to a best performance. In addition to encouraging all staff members to participate in the strategic process.
Staffing Models
Several factors including a facility’s geographic location and budget can make it tough to identify how best to staff a facility. The use of scribes significantly improves the amount of contact time physicians have with patients. With less time spent on record keeping and administrative tasks, physicians can decrease wait times and focus on patients, driving both efficiency and patient experience scores.
Are You Ready to Get Billing?
Want to hire an experts in Medical Billing and Coding for your Practice? You are at the right place, what you need now is a partner who can finish out the rest of the work and make the technology and implementation just as simple. That’s what the best medical billing company like Medisys Data Solutions Inc. can do. If you’re ready to get started, schedule a meeting with our Medical Billing Manager from filling out enquiry form from our website!
