2024 Patient Flow Management Summit

Conference Registration & Networking Breakfast

8:00am – 8:15am

Chairperson’s Opening Remarks

8:15am – 9:00am

The Patient Flow Hub of the Future

This session will feature a case study of how one hospital opened a “patient progression hub”—a command center that is optimizing patient flow management throughout the inpatient hospital. We’ll explore the operations center that is using advanced data analytics to optimize patient flow management, and therefore improve patient care delivery.

9:00am – 9:45am

Strategies to Improve Patient Flow that Will Impact Efficiency

Improving patient flow is a way to increase revenue and patient satisfaction. An efficient patient flow will increase your healthcare facilities’ revenue and, more importantly, keep your patients satisfied and safer. Failing to achieve the proper care at the right time puts your facility at an operational efficiency deficit, which in turn places your patients at risk for less than optimum care and potential harm. Achieving hospital-wide patient flow, and ultimately improving outcomes and the experience of care for patients, requires an appreciation of the hospital as an interconnected, interdependent system of care. It also requires strong leadership; in fact, the role of executive leaders is critical for success.

9:45am – 10:15am

Networking & Refreshments Break

10:15am – 11:00am

How Digital Transformation Can Improve Hospital Operations and Patient Flow

Many companies are interested in digital transformation — using digital technologies to create or modify business processes, culture, and customer experiences — to grow and stay ahead of the competition, and hospitals are no exception. This session will explore key areas where hospitals can leverage digital transformation to improve operational decision-making: patient flow, staffing, scheduling, and supply chain management.

11:00am – 11:45am

Emergency Department Overcrowding: A Manageable Crisis

Emergency departments serve as the conduit for 65 percent of hospital admissions. EDs serve also as temporary boarding sites for patients traversing the hospital system. Boarding is a function of overcrowding as defined by the American College of Emergency Physicians: “A situation that occurs when the identified need for emergency services exceeds available resources for patient care in ED, hospital, or both.” ED boarding is defined as “the patients stay in the ED after the admission was accepted in the hospital, because of absence of inpatient beds.” Managing an ED is complex, with variable inputs, throughput and outputs. Given the interdependency of hospital bed availability, ED management cannot remain limited to the confines of the ED itself. An integrated vision with relevant metrics is required. Increased ED wait times are associated with several negative events. An effective/efficient ED requires an interdepartmental shared vision. This session will explore operational challenges and recommendations for address ED overcrowding.

11:45am – 12:30pm

Implementing Care Transition Teams to Mitigate Hospital Readmissions and Improve Patient Outcomes

Many organizations face high costs and diminishing returns due to unnecessarily high length of stay (LOS) and readmission rates. Elevated LOS and readmission rates can indicate low quality care and result in costly financial penalties. Therefore, addressing LOS and readmission rates can eliminate avoidable financial consequences, while keeping patients out of the hospital and less likely to develop hospital-acquired infections. This session will explore how health systems can implement care transition teams and leverage data analytics to reduce unnecessary patient LOS and readmission rates, resulting in lower costs for health systems and better health for patients, by applying data-driven strategies, including:

– Implementing process changes
– Removing discharge barriers
– Improving care transitions

12:30pm – 1:30pm

Luncheon

1:30pm – 2:15pm

Improving Patient Flow and Care through Data and Analytics

Health systems today generate continuously increasing, historic volumes of data through daily patient care, but existing tools provide limited support for wielding that data to create value. This session will explore integrating key data and applying advanced analytics to deliver insights to caregivers and decision-makers across the health system — from improving operations, to enhancing clinical care, to accelerating research insight generation while ensuring the protection of patient privacy and appropriate use of sensitive data. We’ll also explore improving hospital-wide patient flow through predictive planning and driving better adherence to target staffing ratios while reducing excess costs.

2:15pm – 3:15pm

Panel: Transforming Inpatient Flow: Minimizing Daily chaos and Enhancing Decision-Making       

All too often, hospitals and health systems rely on manual processes and “gut instincts” to manage patient flow, leading to inefficiencies, delays and high costs. But some organizations are moving beyond dashboards and paper- and Excel-based daily reports — instead leveraging proven technology that uses predictive and prescriptive analytics to improve patient flow and optimize resources. This session will explore applying artificial intelligence and machine learning to inpatient flow, and how it enables the frontlines and leadership teams to:

– Predict discharges and admissions

– Get the right patients in the right bed

– Uncover admission and discharge bottlenecks

– Decrease time to complete ICU transfers

– Raise critical decision-making confidence from 50 to 90 percent

3:15pm – 3:45pm

Networking & Refreshments Break

3:45pm – 4:30pm

Strategies to Improve Patient Flow throughout the Health System

Increases in emergency department visits, staff shortages and financial constraints are just a few of the reasons health systems need to proactively manage bed capacity and improve patient flow throughout the health system; from patient access to patient discharge and every step in between. This session will explore strategies to improve workflow, provide more timely care, and decrease overall length of stay, all while serving a larger patient population. This session will explore strategies to improve patient flow throughout the health system.

4:30pm – 5:15pm

How a Command Center Can Improve Patient Access, Flow and Efficiency

A command center will control the flow of patients from the moment they are admitted to their discharge—all from one place. In this session learn how command centers change the way patient capacity is managed in a hospital and throughout the health system, overall leading to positive impacts on patient care.

5:15pm

End of Day One

Networking Breakfast

8:00am – 8:15am

Chairperson’s Remarks

8:15am – 9:00am

Automation and the Patient Experience

Many hospitals and health systems are still not effectively using the technology systems they have to better manage and streamline their operational processes impacting patient flow. On top of that, many of them who are utilizing technology only view its benefits as an efficiency and cost-saving tool for their facilities and not as one that could enhance the patient experience and satisfaction. This session will explore automation solutions that can significantly help improve patient flow.

9:00am – 9:45am

Unlock the Full Potential of Inpatient Bed Capacity with Artificial Intelligence

Every day, hospital staff do the best they can to navigate the daily chaos of bed management by making educated guesses as to what is going to happen over the course of the day. Relying on team huddles throughout the day, staff pore over Excel or paper spreadsheets to predict how many beds will open and when. They try to estimate demand for those beds by the time of day, unsure when to deploy “surge capacity.” On some days, this method works out well. However, often, the staff’s best efforts result in long patient waits, unwanted staff overtime, and ultimately lower access to care. The problem with traditional bed management is that the common approach of using spreadsheets to get a periodic read of patient flow, then trying to unlock capacity by discharging patients faster, simply does not work. It takes sophisticated algorithms and real-time predictive and prescriptive analytics to shape demand, successfully match bed supply, place the right patient in the right bed at the right time, and identify and address discharge barriers. This session will explore how to unlock the full potential of inpatient bed capacity with artificial intelligence.

9:45am – 10:15am

Networking & Refreshments Break

10:15am – 11:00am

Optimizing Transitions of Care

Transitions of care—when patients move from one health care facility to another or back home—that are poorly executed result in adverse effects for patients. Fortunately, programs can be implemented that enhance collaboration across care settings and improve outcomes, including reducing hospital readmission rates and improving patient flow. Traditional health care delivery models typically do not have mechanisms in place for coordinating care across settings, such as when a patient goes from the hospital to a skilled nursing facility or to home. Transitions can fail because of ineffective patient and caregiver education, discharge summaries that are incomplete or not communicated to the patient and the next care setting, lack of follow-up with primary care providers, and poor patient social support. This session will explore ways to improve transitions of care, including improved communication among healthcare providers, better patient and caregiver education, and coordination of social and health care services.

11:00am – 11:45am

Enhancing Clinical Documentation to Improve Patient Flow, Revenue and Quality

Clinical documentation is the foundation of a patient’s medical record and captures patient care from admission to discharge. Studies show that clinical documentation could be improved, on average, in more than 50 percent of medical charts. This is problematic because complete, accurate documentation can prevent ambiguity of diagnoses and treatment, while inadequate documentation can lead to higher readmission rates, LOS, failure in appropriate post-discharge follow-up, increased costs and medication errors. This session will examine how the way we communicate through documentation has a robust impact on our care, quality and reimbursement.

11:45am – 12:30pm

Improving Patient Flow—In and Out of Hospitals and Beyond

Smoothing the flow of patients in and out of hospitals and other healthcare settings can help to reduce overcrowding, prevent poor handoffs, and avoid delays, all of which may worsen as more people gain access to insurance coverage and care. Many hospitals and health systems are pursuing strategies to improve patient flow such as orchestrating the arrival and discharge of patients undergoing elective procedures and transferring the oversight of patients waiting to be admitted from emergency departments to other hospital units. Topics to be discussed will include:

• Putting an end to long stays in the ED
• Timely discharge
• Smoothing patient flow in operating suites
• Improving admissions
• Improving continuity in primary care

12:30pm

Conference Concludes

Workshop: How Standardizing Patient transitions to Post-Acute Settings Can Help Remove Hospital Capacity Bottlenecks

Hospitals and health systems are under increasing financial pressure due to lower revenue and higher costs, with many provider organizations falling into the red. Supply and drug costs have increased due to inflationary pressures, and labor shortages across all disciplines have significantly reduced revenue-generating potential. Hospitals and healthcare systems continue to transfer out or materially delay patient treatment opportunities due to resource constraints. Further, competition from healthcare disruptors, especially in the retail sector, is taking market share from traditional provider organizations. In the face of these market challenges and economic uncertainties, hospitals and health systems must aggressively seek to redesign internal and external processes that are inefficient or frankly ineffective. Though the traditional issues of demand, capacity and throughput must remain top-of-mind for healthcare leaders, previous methods of addressing these, in the face of elevated operating costs and reduced staffed capacity, must be replaced with innovative approaches. Healthcare leaders nationwide are focused on improving patient throughput in their organizations. They realize that they cannot meet the demand in their communities, given reduced capacity, without improving the throughput rate. In addition, patients that exceed their expected length of stay often result in non-reimbursed expenses. Reducing avoidable days, for example, saves nearly $2,900 per day for each patient while making more capacity available for waiting patients. It is important, however, to identify patient populations where the greatest throughput impact can be realized. This session will explore how standardizing patient transitions to post-acute settings can help remove hospital capacity bottlenecks.