From the November 2017 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine
Technology is also an essential part of this solution. The Care Logistics Center has implemented a single information system to manage patient flow — Epic’s patient transfer module. The system allows the team to manage all the resources available at each facility. Staff members also use dashboards to monitor key patient flow metrics in near real time, including transfers, boarding times and ED and OR queues. Staff even track air medical arrivals with a helipad video monitor.
To illustrate how the Care Logistics Center works, consider this “before and after” scenario. In the past, most patients at our smaller community hospitals who needed critical care services were transferred to Hartford Hospital. However, other facilities in our network have very strong ICU teams. Today, thanks to centralized management through the Care Logistics Center, patients with moderate-complexity illnesses are often transferred to other community facilities. This typically keeps those patients closer to home. It also helps us optimize capacity across our system, leveraging community hospital assets while freeing up Hartford Hospital beds for the most complex patients.
Currently, the Care Logistics Center focuses on bed management. In the near future, it will also take over patient transport and environmental services for all five acute facilities. That will enable us to coordinate not just bed assignment, but patient movement and room turnover as well.
A ‘digital twin’ to model logistical impacts
Improving the flow of patients across our system was only half the challenge. To make the best use of our resources, Hartford HealthCare also needed to maximize the utility of our tertiary referral center.
GE Healthcare Partners helped us address this challenge with data analytics. The GE team used 18 months of patient data to create a digital model of patient movement at Hartford Hospital. The result was a “digital twin” of our academic medical center.
This tool has enabled us to do two things. First, it allowed us to identify common areas of breakdown within patient flow and zero in on the processes most in need of improvement. Second, it lets us model various patient flow solutions. We are using our digital twin to test potential solutions in a virtual environment before we invest time and money in any changes.
For example, Hartford Hospital will soon open a dedicated inpatient rehabilitation unit. Before we committed to this initiative, we used the digital twin to understand the impact of converting a general medicine unit into an acute rehabilitation center. The simulation model gave us detailed insight into what we can expect in terms of occupancy rates in the new rehab unit, occupancy rates in other general medicine units as they absorb more volume, staffing efficiency and options for deploying hospitalists.
