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The boarding of patients is a root cause of overcrowding in a majority of emergency departments (EDs) nationwide. It reduces capacity to treat ED patients, decreases bed utilization, and compromises quality, safety, and the patient experience. Because of its systemic nature, it can only be effectively addressed through attention and commitment by all stakeholders. Once emergency departments have addressed throughput challenges they can solve on their own, they are ready to focus on proactive communication and teamwork with inpatient leaders to identify and transfer potential admissions more efficiently. No-delay nurse reports are an important tool to reduce time from admit orders to arrival on patient units. An effective hospital-wide flow committee also removes barriers for admitting patients quickly from the emergency department and addresses a revised January 1, 2014, Joint Commission standard that requires goal setting and measurement to mitigate and better manage the boarding of patients. This article discusses who should attend, the scope of the committee charter, how to use a hospital-wide throughput dashboard to measure results, and includes a sample agenda. It is recommended that the committee also assess and evaluate the effectiveness of the surge plan at least every three years to ensure that it meets goals identified by the committee. This article also shares best practices associated with two key tactics to support an effective hospital-wide throughput committee: inpatient bed huddles to expedite inpatient admissions and inpatient leader rounding, where the inpatient leader rounds on boarded ED patients to ensure safety and quality while also establishing ownership for the transition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses three ways in which dramatic improvements in middle flow, or examination-to-disposition time, can be driven by emergency department (ED) nursing leadership. By operationalizing a “results pending” area, low-acuity patients who are unlikely to be admitted can await diagnostic results or be actively monitored by a dedicated nurse, ED rooms and beds may be reserved for higher acuity patients. Monthly operational stakeholder meetings can provide a consistent opportunity to track, monitor, and improve flow while also celebrating successes and identifying needed performance improvements based on objective metrics for shared goals. Internal customer rounding is a process that serves as effective follow-up from the stakeholder meeting to ensure aligned behaviors to meet identified goals. Frequency of rounding is identified during the stakeholder meeting. By using these three tools, ED stakeholders can effectively focus on solutions instead of barriers to improving middle flow. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As healthcare providers cope with pricing pressures and increased accountability for performance, they should be rededicating themselves to improving the value they deliver to their patients: better outcomes and lower costs. Time-driven activity-based costing offers the potential for clinicians to redesign their care processes toward that end. This costing approach, however, is new to healthcare and has not yet been systematically implemented and evaluated. This article describes early time-driven activity-based costing work at several leading healthcare organizations in the United States and Europe. It identifies the opportunities they found to improve value for patients and demonstrates how this costing method can serve as the foundation for new bundled payment reimbursement approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The full-service US hospital has been described organizationally as a "solution shop," in which medical problems are assumed to be unstructured and to require expert physicians to determine each course of care. If universally applied, this model contributes to unwarranted variation in care, which leads to lower quality and higher costs. We purposely disrupted the adult cardiac surgical practice that we led at Mayo Clinic, in Rochester, Minnesota, by creating a "focused factory" model (characterized by a uniform approach to delivering a limited set of high-quality products) within the practice's solution shop. Key elements of implementing the new model were mapping the care process, segmenting the patient population, using information technology to communicate clearly defined expectations, and empowering nonphysician providers at the bedside. Using a set of criteria, we determined that the focused-factory model was appropriate for 67 percent of cardiac surgical patients. We found that implementation of the model reduced resource use, length-of-stay, and cost. Variation was markedly reduced, and outcomes were improved. Assigning patients to different care models increases care value and the predictability of care process, outcomes, and costs while preserving (in a lesser clinical footprint) the strengths of the solution shop. We conclude that creating a focused-factory model within a solution shop, by applying industrial engineering principles and health information technology tools and changing the model of work, is very effective in both improving quality and reducing costs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Emergency care in large urban hospitals across the country is in the midst of major redesign intended to deliver quality care through improved access, decreased wait times, and maximum efficiency. The central argument in this paper is that the conceptualization of quality including the documentary facts and figures produced to substantiate quality emergency care is socially organized within a powerful ruling discourse that inserts the interests of politics and economics into nurses' work. The Canadian Triage and Acuity Scale figures prominently in the analysis as a high-level organizer of triage work and knowledge production that underpins the way those who administer the system define, measure and evaluate emergency care processes, and then use this information for restructuring. Managerial targets and thinking not only dominate the way emergency work is understood, determined, and controlled but also subsume the actual work of health-care providers in spaces called 'wait times', where it is systematically rendered 'unknowable'. The analysis is supported with evidence from an extensive institutional ethnography that shows what nurses actually do to manage the safe passage of patients through their emergency care process starting with the work of triage nurses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this paper is to explore how nurses are enrolled into and take part in programmes of efficiency and effectiveness. Using the philosophical theorizing about desire as a force or power, I focus specifically on what is understood as relations between desire and productivity in current Westernized health-care systems. Use is made of the idea from Spinoza that human emotions consist only of pleasure, pain, and desire as these act as a motive force. This is then linked with more contemporary work on the politics and discourses of desire. A report on the implementation of a productivity programme in the United Kingdom, The Productive Ward: Releasing time to care™, is explored for the ways its developers set about motivating nurses to endorse and enact the programme. In exploring the mechanics of desire in these processes, a view of desire as productive is promoted. Looking at desire as assembling actions, and an assemblage, moves the analysis to an interrogation of actions and practices used to enable and bring nurses to the process. Moreover, in working through the various modalities and operations of desire, the potential and limits of such projects are abstracted. Such potentials and limits are necessarily set by the intensification of power and desire in the capitalist economy, saturating areas of nursing, and health-care provision. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: To evaluate the impact of consolidation of microbiology laboratories on hospital finances and quality of care. Method: A literature review of multiple articles and case studies was conducted on the topic of consolidation of microbiology services among multiple health care facilities. Results: Elimination of duplicate testing and instrumentation can result in significant cost savings. The quality of results can be improved by staffing the core laboratory with educated, experienced microbiologists. Consolidation of services allows for new, technologically advanced instrumentation, which improves turnaround time. Conclusions: Consolidation of microbiology services, when performed with proper planning, can improve the productivity and turnaround time of testing, as well as reducing the cost of providing care, resulting in positive effects on hospital finances and improved quality of care. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2009 we described a geriatric service line or "portfolio" model of acute care-based models to improve care and reduce costs for high-cost Medicare beneficiaries with multiple chronic conditions. In this article we report the early results of the Medicare Innovations Collaborative, a collaborative program of technical assistance and peer-to-peer exchange to promote the simultaneous adoption of multiple complex care models by hospitals and health systems. We found that organizations did in fact adopt and implement multiple complex care models simultaneously; that these care models were appropriately integrated and adapted so as to enhance their adoptability within the hospital or health care system; and that these processes occurred rapidly, in less than one year. Members indicated that the perceived prestige of participation in the collaborative helped create incentives for change among their systems' leaders and was one of the top two reasons for success. The Medicare Innovations Collaborative approach can serve as a model for health service delivery change, ultimately expanding beyond the acute care setting and into the community and often neglected postacute and long-term care arenas to redesign care for high-cost Medicare beneficiaries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the impact of the application of the Business Process Method (BPM) to the clinical efficiency of a midsize hospital in Taiwan. Topics discusses include the concept of Total Quality Management (TQM) systems in healthcare as in the application of the Architecture of Integrated Information Systems (ARIS) framework for clinical processes optimization, the U.S. Baldrige National Quality Program with its Excellence Assessment Model and the TO-BE processes.

This study was designed to focus on the patient perspective in a reorganisation of care processes at a cancer day care unit (CDU). The effects of dose banding and of taking blood samples one day (or more) before the day care treatment (on Day −1) are investigated in terms of throughput efficiency and perceived service quality. Data were collected by mapping patient processes in detail and surveying patients in two CDUs at a university hospital (n = 308). A univariate model was used to investigate the effect of these factors on patient throughput time, and perceived service quality was examined with multiple linear regression. Taking blood samples on Day −1 decreases patient throughput time and increases the perceived service quality by improving the patient's perception of technical expertise and the outcome. This has a globally positive effect on patients' perceived service quality. Dose banding affected neither patient throughput time nor perceived service quality. Taking the pretreatment blood sample on Day −1 can be considered an important process design characteristic, as it increases both efficiency and service quality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the efforts in reducing fatigue and its negative effects especially to nurses who work long hours. Topics covered include the importance of rest, the position statement developed by American Nurses Association (ANA) regarding the fatigue issue, and the development of evidence-based policies for ensuring a healthy work environment and workforce. The strategies of various U.S. states in improving sleep are also mentioned.