Benefits of Real-Time Care Traffic Control for Hospitals

Just as air traffic controllers monitor incoming flights and schedule them accordingly, hospital operators need to have a clear overview of all the available information for making crucial decisions.

That's where real-time care traffic control comes in. These systems make clinical operations as streamlined and efficient as possible, using a health command center to track bed placements, delays, patient progression, and more.

1. Streamlined patient flow

Patients can receive the care they need when their treatment pathways are streamlined, improving their safety and experience. This can be achieved by reducing bottlenecks that arise due to overcrowding, care delivery delays, or poor handoffs from one department to another.

Real-time care traffic control empowers hospitals to optimize the flow of patient movement from arrival to discharge. It enables them to identify gaps in care, missing pathways, or patient compliance issues in real-time and ensures patients get the right level of care at the right time.

A central command center is like an air traffic control tower in that it monitors current and predicted patient capacity across a network of hospitals. The staff there proactively assess current and projected patient demand to plan for surges that may occur. They also identify technology solutions that can help improve patient flow. Check out here to know more.

2. Better patient experience

Similar to air traffic control, hospitals can improve the patient experience by automating key tasks. These can include scheduling appointments, routing patients to their destinations, monitoring patient progress during care, and ensuring that all required paperwork is received in a timely manner.

This process includes several innovative technology solutions, including sensors for tracking patients and equipment, an EHR for patient data, and a mobile app that allows care teams to engage and interact with their patients. These innovations can make a real difference in reducing the length of stay and improving the patient experience.

In the same vein as a well-designed traffic control system, implementing a care traffic control solution that incorporates a smart mobile app can be an efficient use of resources and will help health systems keep pace with demand in the era of value-based care models. In the long run, this is a winning strategy for providers and their patients alike.

3. Increased staff efficiency

Care traffic control can boost staff efficiency by reducing manual labor and delivering tasks at the moment where they're needed. This helps ensure that every patient receives the right care at the right time and avoids the dreaded scenario of patients waiting in hallways or makeshift patient rooms while waiting for a bed.

Traditionally, hospitals have found it difficult to manage capacity issues. Scarce resources are overbooked and underutilized within the same day, which leads to several undesirable outcomes: long patient waiting times, overworked staff, and millions of dollars in unnecessary operational costs.

For example, hospitals can use real-time care traffic control to increase operating room utilization. A typical hospital operating room is used less than 50-60 percent of the time. By utilizing data science and machine learning, hospitals can monitor utilization, identify pockets for improvement, and automatically reallocate underutilized blocks. This can help reduce costs and improve patient safety. Ultimately, this can result in increased revenue and profitability for healthcare facilities.

4. Enhanced patient safety

Today's hospitals face an environment that's more complex than ever. Patients have become more outspoken and demanding, and health specialists are constantly challenged to do more with less.

Many hospitals are implementing "command centers" in response to operational challenges impacting patient safety. Like air traffic control, these command centers provide a central location for real-time data and response coordination.

The command center at Northeast Georgia Healthcare System keeps a team of health professionals informed and aware of capacity and staffing issues across all four NGHS hospitals. It also tracks bed placement, delays, patient care progression, and EMS dispatch.

In addition to addressing problems with appointment no-shows and increasing revenue through patient recall, automated care pathways also help providers reduce readmissions through enhanced recovery techniques before surgery. This can save thousands of dollars in the long run and improve the overall patient experience.