Effectiveness of Implementing a Predischarge Order to Discharge Patients Before 11 a.m.

Barriers to early discharges include poor communication among the healthcare team and families, pending laboratory test results, delays in discharge orders, medical reconciliation list, and patient transport. The baseline data at our hospital in October 2017 (N = 1,021) showed that 5% of patients were discharged before 11 a.m., with the mean discharge processing time being 145 minutes. The goal of this study was to assess the effectiveness of using an electronic predischarge order to discharge more than 40% of patients before 11 a.m. A predischarge order set was created in the electronic record, which notified the nurses, pharmacists, and case and social workers to complete all tasks related to discharge (medication reconciliation, complete laboratory test results and imaging, and arrange transport with family and nursing homes). The resident teaching service group (N = 381) from November 2017 to September 2018 discharged 22% of their patients before 11 a.m. (baseline: 5%, p value = 3.38638E-22), and the mean total discharge time was 77 minutes (baseline: 145 minutes; p value = 1.12013E-19). Our inability to discharge more than 40% of patients from the resident teaching service group before 11 a.m. was attributed to 3 limitations. We propose three viable recommendations to meet our goal in a future intervention.