Is Centralized Patient Logistics Right for Your Hospital?

Centralizing your hospital’s Patient Placement is a big decision, but it’s probably a smart thing to do if your facility is constantly challenged by an avalanche of phone calls, room cleaning delays, long waits for transport, and overcrowding.

When it comes to supporting a centralized model, there are four main barriers to patient flow.  These four barriers are the most common that hospitals are trying to break through today:

1. Inability to ensure appropriate inpatient admits
2. Failure to quickly obtain inpatient order
3. Lack of centralized bed placement
4. Suboptimal use of existing technology

(Source: The Next Generation Capacity Management Advisory Board (2009))

Problems arising from running a decentralized patient placement process include long wait times in the ED, patients leaving without being seen (LWBS), delayed discharge notifications, delayed/cancelled OR procedures, ambulance diversion, and, most importantly, long patient assignment cycle times. A Centralized Patient Logistics Center relieves all these problems, and especially excels at shortening patient assignment cycles, because it combines staff from transfer centers, registration/admit, clinical/clerical placement staff, patient flow coordinators, transport and any other employees directly involved in patient movement into one centralized location.

Having everyone in a single location fosters direct communications which eliminates time-consuming phone calls, allows caregivers to return to the patients’ bedsides, and ensures that bed resources are optimized.

If you think centralizing patient logistics can fix the issues above in your hospital, we suggest you listen to our recent webinar, “Centralized Patient Logistics Center,” conducted by TeleTracking patient flow consultant Donna J. Butz, RN, MS.

Donna provides a powerful, in-depth explanation of a Centralized Patient Logistics Center, offers examples of throughput successes, and discusses best practices to maximize the use of TeleTracking’s automation technology.