Improving capacity management and patient flow across the system
In 2016, Keck Medicine launched a program to reduce patient length of stay in specific service lines. They knew the key to this was improving capacity management and patient flow across the system.
As a first step, Keck joined Vizient’s Capacity Management: Agility in a Time of Uncertainty Collaborative project in 2020 to discover how other health systems address this complex problem and learn about leading practices that could be implemented.
Through the collaborative, Keck developed a capacity management plan that accounted for the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic and focused on initiatives in four areas: capacity management/patient flow, admissions, discharge planning and bed turnaround.
Initiatives dubbed “Just Do it” improvements addressed patient bed assignments and hospital occupancy. Using the Vizient Clinical Data Base (CDB), Keck looked at it its historical data on patient stays and hospital capacity.
A major benchmark that Keck utilizes as part of its capacity management work is the CDB Length of Stay Index by hospital. When the improvement work began in 2016, Keck ranked 119th among its customized peer group. As of early 2021, the facility ranked 12th in this metric within its peer group.
Identify and complete
“Just Do It”
improvements
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