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How to Streamline Patient Throughput

How to Streamline Patient Throughput

There are a number of different challenges that can emerge and slow down patient throughput in healthcare. But inefficient throughput isn’t just a problem in itself. Often, the challenges compound.

Patients who have to wait for long periods of time are less satisfied and less likely to return. They may even rmend that friends and family members stay away. Inefficient throughput is hard on staff as well, which can lead to disengagement and even turnover. Combine this with longer lengths of stay and higher inpatient costs, and it all results in significant financial issues.

For health organizations, the message is clear: improving patient throughput is critical. While it might seem daunting to change your current processes, it’s well worth the effort. Better throughput in healthcare can improve patient experience scores, help retain patients, shorten hospital stays, and even increase revenue.

And with the help of digital tools, improving your throughput can be easier than you might think. Below, we’ve listed a few ideas for using digital tools to address and overcome common hurdles in patient throughput. Read on to learn more.

Patient Throughput Challenges From 3 Perspectives

Before jumping into the solutions themselves, we’ll set the stage first. Let’s look at throughput challenges from the perspectives of three different groups: patients, staff, and health systems.

Patients

In inpatient settings, the chief complaint from patients is nearly always lengthy wait times. Patients must wait on doctors or nurses to discuss their diagnosis or ask questions about their treatment. They also wait for requests, some of which are as simple as asking for a blanket. When patients don’t know when they will see staff or have their requests addressed, it’s even more frustrating.

Staff

In recent years, clinical workloads have increased. Beyond providing care, many staff members spend two hours a day or more in EHR systems doing administrative work. COVID-19 also brought an influx of patients and spurred mass resignations, putting even more pressure on clinical staff. As a result, efficient throughput in healthcare has become all the more difficult.

Health Systems

Many health systems today are facing financial challenges. As fewer staff leads to longer hospital stays, the cost of providing inpatient services is increasing while reimbursement decreases. So even when volume picks up, revenue doesn’t necessarily keep pace. On top of that, health systems are struggling to hire as many staff as they need. This makes it harder to give patients the level of individual attention that they need, and meet their requests. And operations challenges like these only increase costs. Ultimately, this creates a cycle in which lower revenue makes it even more difficult to hire staff.

Digital Solutions to Improve Patient Throughput in Healthcare 

So, which digital tools can help address patient throughput challenges like the ones listed above? We’ve listed several ideas below.

Feedback

All patients want their voices heard. Without a feedback platform, though, it’s difficult for them to feel that way. Providing an easy way for them to give feedback — like via text messages — allows patients to advocate for themselves and helps staff improve patients’ stays. Rounding tools, meanwhile, can help consolidate patient requests and flag urgent ones that require immediate attention.

Lean More: Q Rounding — Listen in Real-Time While Patients Are in Your Care

Education

A big part of improving patient satisfaction is simply setting expectations. When patients don’t know what exactly their stay will involve, they can feel blindsided and even upset that things haven’t gone the way they had planned. Consider sending educational material via text message — like videos, visual PDFs, and checklists — that explains patients’ treatment, provides them with instructions, and addresses FAQs.

Once a patient actually checks in, you can continue to send them resources that explain instructions and next steps to proactively prepare them for discharge. The more you educate your patients, the more they’ll comply with instructions — which can lead to shorter stays and better health outcomes.

On the staff’s end, consider replacing patient dry-erase whiteboards with digital whiteboards that contain real-time nursing and medical information. That way, a quick glance will allow clinical staff to get up to speed without having to rely on outdated information or decipher sloppy or partially-erased handwriting. What’s more, staff won’t have to go through the redundant process of recording all of the information they already entered into the EHR onto a whiteboard.

Operations

At most hospitals, patient requests will be shared en masse with a patient’s entire care team, even if they’re not the ones who can address them. Look into a platform that not only aggregates patient requests, but offers smart tasking routing that directs requests to the appropriate contacts. A request to raise the temperature of a patient’s room, for example, can be directed right toward the facilities team rather than requiring care staff to manually contact them.

And as patients wait for requests to be addressed or see a member of their care team, sharing wait-time notifications and status updates can assure them that their concerns are being heard. Some delays are unavoidable, but if a patient knows when they can expect a resolution, they become a lot more forgiving.

One easy stage to reduce wait time is during discharge. Sharing forms and instructions over text can initiate discharge planning earlier in a patient’s stay.

Sharing information around items like medications and at-home care earlier on allows patients to discuss them in detail with their provider, improving understanding of their treatment plans and post-discharge success. It also prevents patients from being overwhelmed by a deluge of paperwork at the very end, which can reduce the anxiety associated with discharge and speed up the process.

Start Streamlining Patient Throughput Today 

Patient throughput is a complex process. With so many different moving parts, making changes can be intimidating. But with efficient patient throughput playing such a key role in improving the patient experience and reducing the hospital length of stay, it’s one of the most valuable hospital cost reduction strategies available.

Thankfully, with the wealth of digital tools at hand, streamlining throughput in healthcare has become all the more simple and effective. And the sooner you begin to streamline your patient throughput, the sooner your organization will see the benefits.

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