If you’ve ever had trouble deciding where to go when you or someone you care about needs medical attention, you’re not alone. It’s common to wonder if you should go to the emergency department (ED) or your primary care physician (PCP). Cincinnati Aligning Forces for Quality, led by the Health Collaborative, is helping patients answer this question with the “Make the Right Call” campaign.
The campaign is supporting the Greater Cincinnati community by helping to reduce avoidable ED admissions. Many people who use emergency departments for non-emergencies...
As part of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s signature effort to improve the quality of health care 150 hospital teams participated in prestigious national program over the last 18 months.
Ninety percent of the hospital teams participating in this AF4Q hospital quality improvement collaborative improved the quality of care for their patients in measurable ways, resulting in hundreds of avoided readmissions; improved patient safety; standardized data collection on patients’ race, ethnicity and language preference (R/E/L), a critical part of tracking and meeting...
Mount Clemens Hospital of Mount Clemens, MI, is a non-profit, suburban hospital with 56,000 emergency department (ED) visits each year. The ED frequently was crowded with patients waiting for inpatient beds. The ED and hospital leadership created a process in which a designated person sends out the hospital census every morning, accompanied with any information on patients anticipated to need admission, throughout the facility. This process alerts the hospital of the urgency for beds in an organized manner and allows staff to better match their demand (ED patients needing beds) with...
HD Goodall Hospital in Sanford, ME, is a rural, non-profit hospital seeing about 22,000 patients a year. The emergency department (ED) staff has demonstrated outstanding innovation in implementing strategies that support the total picture of the patient. The staff at HD Goodall continues their system of bringing patients straight back to the rooms when beds are available. These patients are registered at the bedside and triaged in the room to expedite the intake process and decrease wait times. When beds are unavailable, a concierge in the waiting room greets people and begins the...
Many Increasing Throughput hospitals have learned that solving the problem of emergency department (ED) crowding requires getting the entire hospital involved.
Mount Clemens Hospital, a non-profit suburban hospital in Mount Clemens, MI, that sees about 56,000 ED patients each year, decided to tackle crowding head-on by challenging its principal driver: boarding. Boarding patients is a coping mechanism EDs use when beds are not available in inpatient units, but it can lead to delays in necessary treatment as well as patients leaving without being seen.
The...
At first, staff at Carson City Hospital in Michigan were incredulous when quality department staff told them their scores on compliance with ideal care measures were lower than the standard the 77-bed acute care hospital had set.
“Our nurses didn’t really understand what core measures were really, really all about, or what it takes to actually get in compliance with those measures,” said Joan Sweet, vice president and chief quality/risk officer at Carson City Hospital.
The hospital was searching for a way to re-educate and re-energize staff members about the...
Truman Medical Center-Hospital Hill in Kansas City, MO, is an urban non-profit hospital with an ED flow of 62,000 patients. Like many EDs, Truman frequently tells its patients who received sutures to return five to seven days later to have them removed. These patients often had to wait long periods of time for this simple procedure. The facility aimed to improve its turnaround times for these patients by creating more efficiency in their suture removal protocol. The goal was to reduce door to discharge to less than 20 minutes in more than 90 percent of its wound and suture removal...
St. Elizabeth Healthcare-Edgewood in Cincinnati, OH, is a non-profit suburban hospital seeing about 77,000 emergency department (ED) patients per year. The ED recognized a significant barrier to quality and efficiency in the care of admitted patients was driven by suboptimal communication and accountability for patient handover and transfer issues. When the ED called to report on a patient, the floor nurse wasn’t available. When the floor nurse called back, the ED nurse wasn’t available. This form of “telephone tag” occurred daily and was frustrating to all staff....
The Albuquerque Coalition for Healthcare Quality launched a series of radio ads to educate patients about when to use an emergency department (ED) or an urgent care facility. In addition to radio ads, the Alliance is also implementing print ads in local newspapers and posters in public buildings and private employer sites. This campaign aims to reduce non-emergency visits to the ED, resulting in higher quality of care, improved efficiency, and shorter ED wait times. Pat Montoya, director of ACHQ, notes that this public service announcement initiative is part of a bigger strategy at the...