October 22, 2019

Patient Flow Epic Gold Stars: Are you a patient flow all-star?

Freeman Jenkins

The people, processes, and technology driving admission, transport, environmental services, and discharge workflows have huge impacts on the efficiency and quality of your hospital operations. Optimizing patient movement flow can improve:

  • Length of stay
  • Patient experience
  • Operating costs
  • Provider experience

Here are 5 ways to begin accomplishing these goals:

  1. Centralize patient movement operations into a single location
    • Examples: Bed planning, transport, environmental services, case management
  2. Fully leverage your technology and automate manual processes
    • Examples: Bed assignment criteria, non-patient transport, bed availability, mobile technology for transporters and environmental services staff
  3. Define key performance indicators (KPIs) for your organization
    • Examples: Bed assignment lag times, cleaning turnaround times, transport response times, capacity thresholds
  4. Build smart reports and dashboards based on your KPIs to proactively address bottle necks
  5. Train your operational leaders to take appropriate action based upon data

If you are an Epic client a great place to start is to fully leverage your core electronic health record systems. To help ensure its clients are doing just that, Epic released its Gold Stars program for 2019 with a new focus on patient flow. The program is designed to help measure and reward feature adoption to align with Epic best practice and can help you lay the technical foundation to drive operational improvements.

How can you keep the stars you have and even add a few?

  1. Work with your Epic representatives to obtain your specific organization’s Gold Starts Report
  2. Prioritize the items identified in the report based on value and effort
  3. Implement those features

The Wilshire Group has experience in all the ways listed above to optimize your patient movement operations and technology. We’re here to help you drive those improvements, and maybe pick up a few more gold stars along the way. If you’d like to chat about what might be a good fit for your organization please reach out to Freeman Jenkins and Matt Perron.

Freeman Jenkins

Manager, Patient Access

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