Increasing Throughput
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...
Improving the flow of patients through the emergency department (ED) is an important goal for hospitals looking to reduce ED crowding and provide better care to the growing number of patients who seek treatment in the ED.
- As a result of hospitals’ efforts through this initiative, 10,000 patients avoided leaving EDs before care was provided.
- Fifty-five percent of participating teams reduced the time patients spent in their EDs by an average of 30 minutes.
- Forty teams representing 14 AF4Q Alliances participated in the Improving Throughput collaborative.By the end of the collaborative, 95 percent of the hospital teams in Improving Throughput had successfully standardized their registration systems to collect self-reported race, ethnicity and language data.
Learn more about AF4Q's hospital quality initiatives or to view the final data, click here.
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For 18 months, nearly 150 hospital teams participated in a prestigious national program to improve the quality and safety of patient care in hospitals. The effort is part of Aligning Forces for Quality (AF4Q), the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s signature effort to improve the quality of health care in 16 targeted communities across the country, reduce disparities, and provide models of reform.
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 diverse patient needs; and improved emergency department (ED) care.
Hospitals participating in the effort were part of a virtual network where they developed, shared, and implemented quality improvement tools, strategies, and lessons learned. The project was funded by RWJF and supported by experts at the George Washington University in Washington, DC.