February 9, 2022

With the recent surge of inpatients that many hospitals have been facing, whether due to COVID or those who have finally elected to have surgeries that they had previously put off, there is now a current premium on bed space.  We recently talked to a clinician at a local facility who revealed that the patient volume had spiked so much in recent days that the staff had been forced to utilize the hospital’s halls to temporarily house certain patients.  

Regardless of what the current circumstances may be at your facility, it would not hurt to begin considering strategies for handling an unexpected influx of patients.  Are there ways to maximize your capacity?  A recent discussion with healthcare leaders across the country led to the generation of five goals that may provide some answers. Those goals, as laid out by Pallabi Sanyal-Dey, MD, FHM, are summarized below.

Streamline Planning Meetings

Hospital staff that are tasked with scheduling cases and inpatient intake often have insufficient tools at their disposal.  Often, they are placed in the position of making reactive decisions and general troubleshooting based on the daily patient flow.  At some facilities, Excel or color-coded paper spreadsheets are reviewed to predict how many beds will open up and when.  It is up to such staff to then estimate demand on a daily basis.

To better anticipate need, many hospitals are moving towards AI-based technology to better predict inpatient bed demand.  According to Dr. Dey:

These solutions create a system-wide source of truth, predicting admissions, discharges, and end-of-day “balance” by unit. This support helps keep daily huddle meetings targeted and brief, and ensures they only occur at times throughout the day when they are truly needed. One hospital’s daily meetings now last no more than fifteen minutes after adopting [such solutions].

Increase Timeliness of Surge Units

Hospitals need to factor in trends of bed occupancy.  This means determining where new demand typically originates and which departments are likely to have higher utilization.  This capability allows staff to be more agile and proactive in triaging patient flow and specialized care. It also enables staff to match demand with supply correctly and open surge units only when needed.

Manage Internal Transfers

Internal transfers are often thought of as costly—an action of last resort.  However, Dr. Dey believes that transfers can be used as “a proactive tool to support supply-demand matching, if they are deployed wisely and selectively.”  For example, by anticipating the need ahead of time and moving the right patients to appropriate open beds, “placement teams can open up the right slots to meet expected demand for high-value beds.” Again, a proper analytics tool is vital to this kind of analysis.

Improve the Discharge

According to Dr. Dey, the amount of time it takes to discharge a patient is within the administrators’ control.  She writes, “Strategically planning and addressing discharge needs starting at the time of admission is the most effective way to safely reduce discharge times. The true focus should be on overall patient flow.”

Now, while it’s true that hospital leaders and staff can’t do much to accelerate a patient’s normal healing process, they can ensure the patient is efficiently delivered to each of the next stages in the care journey.  Dey asserts that “Providing a transparent software solution to coordinate the entire care management team helps anticipate potential delays before they occur.”

This involves what’s known as predictive modeling.  It is already in use in other business sectors, such as the airline industry.  This technology can also be used in discharge planning. According to Dey, “these solutions alert case management and social services teams to potential discharge barriers sooner rather than later, allowing teams to address the issues earlier and avoid delays.”

Promote Visibility

The last goal involves better visibility.  Dr. Dey believes that all patients need a system-wide approach in the management of their care.  However, this becomes a challenge where individual facilities within a health system end up functioning as islands and thereby struggle to collaborate with others in the network.

Technology solutions are able to provide decision-makers a better view of the entire system’s capacity.  This includes the ability to provide the team with “up-to-the-minute information on which hospitals are best equipped to take which patients and which are struggling with capacity at a given time.” This visibility allows viable transfers between facilities and allows health systems to optimize their entire capacity of inpatient beds, according to Dey.

If you have questions about how we at MiraMed Global Services can help you find ways to maximize your facility’s capacity, please contact us at info@miramedgs.com.