ED slashes average wait time by more than an hour
ED slashes average wait time by more than an hour
Team studies facilities, creates own model
No emergency department cuts its average door-to-doc time from 93 minutes to 20 minutes by accident. The success story at Memorial Hermann Memorial City Medical Center in Houston was the result of discovering a patient flow model at another facility that was superior to theirs, and then continuing to search out additional models to come up with their own system that best addressed their specific needs. The result was a model they call ExcelERate, which includes a more detailed nurse assessment up front, parallel processes, and the carving out of an intake area within the ED.
"We reoriented our entire space, putting divider screens in four rooms to duplicate our capacity," explains Michele Bell, RN, MBA, chief nursing officer at Memorial Hermann. The department now has 10 intake and procedure rooms; five continuing care rooms with stretchers; four rooms with two recliners each, separated by curtains, with 13 spaces for continuing care and 13 acute care beds; and an overflow room that has 10 chairs.
The changeover began when Jim Parisi, RN, Memorial Hermann Healthcare System executive of emergency services, went to Phoenix to visit Banner Estralia Hospital at the invitation of its client, Cerner. Banner Estralia was using Cerner IT systems and had gone paperless. "We took a tour of the hospital that started in the ED — and we just stayed there," he recalls.
What impressed Parisi was that the busy ED (60,000-70,000 visits a year) "seemed so well organized and relatively quiet." He started asking lots of questions, and when he came home, he met with TeamHealth, which provides ED coverage for the system. "We agreed that while this would not do everything for us, their 'split-flow' process had the most chance of anything we had seen to help us," says Parisi.
Then, a team that included physicians, nurses, and representatives from the lab, radiology, and administration visited the Banner facility. "As an interdisciplinary team, they had to envision how this would work in our physical plant," says Parisi.
Children's hospitals toured
The research didn't end there, says Bell, who joined the team on the Phoenix trip. "We also saw several children's hospitals in Cleveland, because we will be putting in a children's ED in June, and then we kind of combined the best of all the models," she notes.
Because the staff already had had extensive experience with Six Sigma methodology, the conversion process also was facilitated by Black belts and Green belts, "so we knew we could show measurable improvement," says Bell.
That they have accomplished: Parisi says the left-without-treatment rate had been as high as 9%-10%, "and now it is way less than 2%." That improvement, adds Bell, also is reflected in the department's Press Ganey patient satisfaction scores. "We started in very low digits and now run anywhere from 80 to 95," she reports.
No emergency department cuts its average door-to-doc time from 93 minutes to 20 minutes by accident. The success story at Memorial Hermann Memorial City Medical Center in Houston was the result of discovering a patient flow model at another facility that was superior to theirs, and then continuing to search out additional models to come up with their own system that best addressed their specific needs.Subscribe Now for Access
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