Sharon Mace, MD, Director of the Observation Unit at the Cleveland Clinic kicked off the formal beginning of the conference. They run about 6,000 patients through their 20 bed observation unit at the Cleveland Clinic per year.
Anna Brooks, the Director of Case Management at Sebastian River Medical Center, provided a great overview of the challenges […]
Well, I made it to Las Vegas. My workshop, which focuses on how observation units fit into hospital wide patient flow studies starts in about an hour. Cara Strom has done a great job researching, recruiting and producing the event - and been very patient with me. The following is from the blurb on my […]
Software vendor TeleTracking Technologies and the American College of Emergency Physicians commissioned a survey last month on the state of patient flow in North American hospitals (press release - pdf). The survey is based on interviews with managers, directors and executives, representing over 200 hospitals.
Virtually all the hospitals who participated in the survey felt that […]
Medical Care, the journal of the American Public Health Association published a paper this month on the incremental cost to treat non-urgent outpatients in an emergency department setting versus an outpatient clinic. Using California hospital data submitted to the Office of Statewide Health Planning and Development (OSHPD) between 1990 and 1998 the data were used […]
The Billings Clinic, Billings, Montana, is participating in a three-year CMS demonstration project, trying to reduce
costs to Medicare. The project seeks to determine whether spending
more money on preventive care and disease management saves money
overall by preventing hospitalizations. The Billings Clinic project is focused on CHF (chronic heart failure) patients. For patients over 65, CHF is […]
This hospital design article explores what it means to design in flexibility, especially regarding cost and time trade-offs. There is a nice discussion of acuity adaptable rooms:
The discussion of flexibility in
design and time is really explored as the research of acuity-adaptable
and universal rooms is further developed. This subject has been debated
for the past 15 years […]
A recent study by Press Ganey reports that the average length of stay (LOS) in U.S. emergency departments is 3.7 hours. The study was completed in 2005 and shows considerable variations between states. The shortest ED LOS was in Iowa (138.3 minutes) and Nebraska (146.1 minutes), while Maryland (246.9 minutes) and Arizona (297.3 minutes) reported […]
At HIMSS this year I had a chance to sit down and chat with Eric Morgan, CEO of StatCom. The patient flow application market segment has recently started to take off. Tele-Tracking is the oldest vendor and marketshare leader. More recent competitors, like StatCom, are persuing different strategies to deliver the most value and gain […]
This management truism is placed squarely in a hospital context in this column by Tina Foster, in Health Care's Most Wired Magazine (am I the only one who thinks that's a pretty silly name for a magazine?). In my hospital practice, the biggest barrier to operational improvements is the lack of operational data. This lack […]
Under a trial funded by a $3.1 million grant from the NIH, Brigham and Women's Hospital is using 10 waist packs (that sounds so much better than “fanny packs” doesn't it?) that patients will wear containing sensors, transmitters, and
tracking gear. The packs will allow medical staff to constantly monitor
patients' heart rates and blood-oxygen levels while […]
