Issue link: https://beckershealthcare.uberflip.com/i/164052
Executive Briefing: The Value of Time in Healthcare Prevention Failures 7.2 9.8 Fraud Inflated Prices 53 This is how the Institute of 27.5 Unnecessary Services Medicine (IOM) breaks down the causes of financial waste in 13.7 U.S. Healthcare. TeleTracking 17 believes inefficient care delivery 24.8 Excess Administrative Costs Inefficient Care Delivery also contributes to several other categories mentioned here. Another reason may be that wasted time is suites and increasing their utilization to an prises from their desktops and intervene a very subjective concept. Taking the time to optimal level. when necessary to rectify problems. Rush University Medical Center added Adapting the RTE model to healthcare over $40 million in revenue by automating requires the expanded use of automation, and combining its patient placement and instrumentation, location and condition- do something correctly seems to be a very good idea in healthcare, so how do you get people to agree on what actually constitutes "wasted" time in a hospital? transfer processes to free up space for sensing technologies, as well as event- In a recent Institute of Medicine (IOM) inter-hospital transfer cases requiring driven approaches, advanced messaging, report entitled Better Care at Lower Cost tertiary care. interoperability, and wireless mobility. What these providers have in common is By combining its market-leading patient using real-time automation to convert flow software, business analytics engine and wasted time into usable space. From bed real-time location system on a single turns, to transport, to post-op to discharge, operating system, TeleTracking is bringing they have wrung idle time out of their the RTE to healthcare providers on an operations. The result is greater efficiency, a integrated, web-based, enterprise-wide reduction of chaos, and better planning that platform. Known as Real-Time Capacity allows them to treat more patients. And they Management™, it displays a hospital or were able to begin saving time and money system's physical tasks as they unfold via immediately after system "go-live." desktop dashboards. Data such as bed (September 2012, www.iom.edu/bestcare), one of the top 10 recommendations for Healthcare in America is Optimized Operations. In the report, the IOM recommends healthcare delivery organizations should: "Continuously improve health care operations to reduce waste, streamline care delivery, and focus on activities that improve patient health. Care delivery organizations should apply systems engineering tools and process improvement methods to improve operations and care delivery processes." When operational efficiency and elimination of wasted time is a focus, the dividends are multi fold. Consider this: Methodist Health System of San Antonio was able to add over $150 million to its bottom line in two and a half years by extracting wasted time from its multi-hospital operations through the automation of its capacity management process. Cleveland Clinic was able to forgo a multi- Researchers at the University of Wisconsin postulate that time may be the greatest edge that enterprises have in the 21st century. That is a big reason why industry is turning to the "real-time enterprise" model. RTEs, as they're called, use a network of intelligent sensing devices, combined with automation, to provide a "moving picture" of productivity. RTEs provide instantaneous turnaround times, emergency department average wait times, discharge times and average length of stay are measured against key performance indicators in easy-to-read graph displays. Combined with real-time alerts and notifications, they allow corrective action to be taken in moments rather than requiring days or weeks to analyze performance data. decision-making ability via these massively Pulling wasted time out of the patient distributed monitors, allowing an organiza- flow continuum frees up bed space so tion to know at all times what is going on. throughput can be accelerated. That means This allows managers to run entire enter- more surgeries can be performed and more million dollar addition of operating suites by patients can be transferred from other automating patient flow through its existing hospitals for the care they need.