Better Flow Program Launches New Initiatives
The Better Flow Program is a series of projects that aim to track patient movement and reduce unnecessary delays throughout a typical hospital patient’s journey. Everyone is impacted by the quality of patient flow – from patients to staff to clinicians.
Two tools that have recently been implemented across UR Medicine in phases include:
- The Capacity Management Dashboard (a subset of Bed Planning) provides a real-time view to easily visualize and manage expected patient volume (from both ED and OR), Current Occupancy, and Potential Capacity of our units. Highland Hospital has already been using this tool, and it has recently become available at Strong, Golisano Children’s, and Thompson.
UR Medicine has already reaped the benefits of operational efficiency since the launch of the Better Flow program last year. For example:
- The average time to prepare a bed at Highland has improved by 5 minutes, thanks to the Hospital Logistics project. With about 50 discharges per day, that’s 250 minutes (or 4.16 hours) saved each day!
In the coming months, the Bed Planning initiative’s projects will ultimately optimize and take a more centralized approach to assign beds efficiently by engaging our interdisciplinary team.
Keep Tracking Performance
It is critical to track progress and performance during times of change to gain insight into how we are adapting, growing as an enterprise, and focusing our next efforts to improve. These upcoming initiatives – and those already rolled out and adopted – collect data in relation to the quality of care. This data becomes increasingly reliable with consistent use, benchmarks, and milestones, but only if leaders are tracking performance at our unit levels!
With this in mind, all unit-based teams are asked to review the CQI Datastore Better Flow Discharge Explorer Dashboard to ensure that Medically Ready for Discharge Date (MRDD) is used consistently and appropriately. The goal is to improve MRDD use to 73% of all hospital discharges within the next year. Current overall usage and more information are available on the Better Flow intranet page.
“Each of the Better Flow initiatives represents a phenomenal change for our enterprise and aims to enhance the patient movement experience for both patients and clinicians,” said Michael Apostolakos, M.D., Chief Medical Officer for Strong Memorial and Highland Hospitals. “We look forward to seeing this program progress and feel confident we will see the benefits of improved patient flow as all faculty and staff embrace and use the tools and data.” If you have feedback or questions for the Better Flow team, please reach out to BETTERFlowProgram@URMC.Rochester.edu.
Keely Dwyer-Matzky, M.D., M.S., is Associate Chief Medical Officer for Patient Flow and Capacity Management for URMC and the lead for the Better Flow initiative. She can be reached at keely_dwyermatzky@urmc.rochester.edu
A short video about Better Flow and information about new workflows and process changes are available on the Better Flow intranet site. Please continue to look for information in email and other widespread communications about Better Flow changes and the results being achieved.
11/1/2022
You may also like