SYSTEMS INTEGRATION
The Patient Flow Conundrum
Mark Ebbens, GE Healthcare Performance Solutions’ UK Business Leader for Patient Care Capacity Management, explains how to solve capacity management in healthcare to improve quality, flow and efficiency.
H
ospitals today face unprecedented financial and operational pressures.
NHS leaders are, of course, acutely aware of this fact. The question is...where to turn when efficiency programmes only yield small incremental savings as pressure continues to grow?
The answer may lie in the way hospitals manage their care-giving capacity to better support patient flow. The cost of providing healthcare in the UK is largely fixed – buildings, beds, staff, equipment, services and supplies for example. These costs vary very little with activity, so the key is to efficiently manage this capacity so that cost per patient is reduced.
Hospitals in the UK fall into two categories when it comes to patient flow: those with over-capacity – more beds than required, but feeling full because of inefficiency and variability; and those which are capacity- constrained – demand exceeds available capacity and congestion drives costs up and compromises quality. Either way, the chal- lenge is to improve patient flow and qual- ity of care by better matching capacity to demand, a challenge that other industries have historically faced and overcome. But healthcare lags way behind; slow to adopt proven techniques that enable efficient capacity management. Maybe it’s because “patients aren’t widgets”, or because “hos- pitals aren’t factories”, or maybe it’s just too difficult.
It is difficult, but provided you can overcome three key characteristics common to all hospitals, it is achievable. Firstly, hospitals are rife with variability – arrival patterns, acuity, procedure lengths, schedules, availability…hospitals don’t see averages, they see variability. Secondly, all steps in the patient journey are interdependent, if you change one thing, it affects another. Finally, the system is dynamic – what you see today, is different tomorrow, next week or in winter. Hospitals are never in ‘steady- state’.
If it were possible to minimise that variation, then dynamically match capacity to demand, we would all be in a happier place; especially those patients who suffer long waits, non-clinical bed transfers and delayed discharges.
58 | national health executive Mar/Apr 12
At GE Healthcare Performance Solutions we have developed a solution to this challenge. Patient Care Capacity Management is designed to help hospitals operate safely, efficiently and sustainably at elevated occupancy. This innovative approach allows hospitals to create a clear capacity strategy, shaping the way forward and defining the operational transformation and workflow technology required to make it a reality. Using sophisticated techniques, a simulation model of the current patient flow is built, replicating all of the inherent variability, interdependencies and dynamism.
Inefficiencies are revealed, scenarios tested, ideas tried, benefits quantified and an optimum capacity strategy developed. It is not difficult to see how this new level of understanding will revolutionise the optimisation of patient care workflows. Of course this requires operational transformation to deliver these strategic objectives and as veterans of over 150 major performance improvement programmes in the NHS, the GE team knows what is required to drive sustainable change.
But change alone is not enough – just like the airline industry, it is impossible to manage the volume of traffic passing through without a sophisticated traffic control system. GE Healthcare’s
Performance Solutions AgileTrac system achieves this through a suite of software applications, real-time patient tracking, asset tracking and workflow technology.
AgileTrac supports the vital patient flow processes that make operating at high occupancy manageable and eventually routine. Hospitals in the UK who seek support to meet their QIPP agenda, aspire to foundation trust status or who simply need significant, sustainable cash savings are turning to GE Healthcare to help transform their Patient Care Capacity Management for maximum impact.
While ongoing healthcare reforms will almost certainly lead to changes that no one can fully anticipate, it is clear that better capacity management is one of the most important financial levers available to healthcare leaders today.
Mark Ebbens is GE Healthcare Perfor- mance Solutions’ UK Business Leader
for
Patient Care Capacity Management, a Mas- ter Black Belt in Lean Six Sigma and an ex- pert in patient flow.
Mark Ebbens
FOR MORE INFORMATION
mark.ebbens@ge.com
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