Smooth patient flow should be priority: experts

Smoothing patient flow can improve quality, safety, hospital finances and patient satisfaction, and should be a priority for all healthcare organizations. That was the takeaway message from a session at the annual meeting of the American College of Healthcare Executives, in Chicago, led by two experts in healthcare leadership and performance improvement.

Long waits and boarding of patients in the emergency department are a “canary in the coalmine,” indicating a hospital-wide problem with the flow of patients throughout an organization, said Dr. Kirk Jensen, chief medical officer of Fairfax, Va.-based Best Practices, a healthcare staffing and services company.

Jensen cautioned against siloed approaches to addressing patient flow. “You can't optimize ICU flow at the expense of the OR or the ED,” he said. “If we improve and optimize flow throughout, we can take in all of those revenue streams.”

He advocated the use of fast-tracking protocols for critically ill patients, bed management processes, early warning systems, long-term forecasting and other strategies to ease throughput.

Dr. Thom Mayer, Best Practices' founder and CEO, also discussed the role that flow has on patient satisfaction—a relationship he said providers are paying even more attention to since the federal government tied a portion of hospitals' payments to satisfaction scores, as part of its value-based purchasing program.

“Timeliness of care is strongly correlated to satisfaction,” he said.

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