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In a health care landscape that requires health care organizations to act efficiently and prudently, AHA Solutions actively assists hospitals to better understand their own situation with peer-to-peer learning.
The 2010 Patient Flow* Challenges survey asked hospital personnel to indicate challenges in their facilities to patient flow across eight key stages, capturing information on which areas are solved and which are current concerns. The data was collected and compiled into the Patient Flow Challenges Assessment (PFCA). Providing critical insights, this assessment enables AHA Solutions to not only identify products and services to overcome obstacles, but also to develop impactful educational programs supporting hospitals in their quest to achieve operational excellence.
Find Out What This Year's PFCA Results Discovered!
The PFCA identified specific challenges at each of the eight stages of patient care. Optimized patient flow is not a matter of fixing one stage, but it is about enterprise-wide throughput and capacity. The results examine the challenges and solutions at a granular level of the individual stage and AHA Solutions can recommend the strategies that hospitals have employed to improve overall throughput and capacity.
Overview of results: View the Executive Summary
Taken from the Executive Summary, the graph below provides an overview of the stages and the responses to the 2010 PFCA. Participants reported that the Discharge and Admissions stages are by far their top patient flow priorities in 2010. However, the Post-Discharge, Discharge and Home stages generated the highest average levels of concern: 10 of the top 15 specific individual concerns are within these stages. The top three specific concerns, shared by more than 70% of participants, are patient non-compliance with discharge instructions, inadequate communication to/from physicians and inability to reconcile home and inpatient medications electronically.
Background
In 2007, AHA Solutions designated Patient Flow as a primary area for performance improvement in hospitals. An advisory committee guided this effort developing an extensive list of obstacles that slowed the patient flow process. During this research eight stages of patient flow were identified, as shown above. Strictly to reduce redundancy, it was determined to combine the stages of diagnosis and procedure and use home as the last stage, though it could be considered the first stage.
Purpose
Tasked with the ongoing process of identifying obstacles for operational process improvement, AHA Solutions conducts this assessment to establish a benchmark for the challenges hospitals encounter in patient throughput and capacity management. This is not a scientific
study, this assessment provides a snapshot of the critical obstacles that hospitals face. The data is then used by AHA Solutions to develop educational programs that address these challenges and to find products that will enhance patient flow.
* Throughput/capacity
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Learn more about the PFCA results by listening to the replay of the August 26 webinar which announced the results of the PFCA and showcased the impressive improvements in patient flow made by Christiana Care in Wilmington DE.
For a copy of the results, please click here. |
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