Orlando, FL On January 14th, we presented at the 2019 Hospital Patient Flow Management Forum on the topic: “Strategies to Create and Implement a Flexible Staffing Model to Optimize Patient Flow.” The audience comprised many leading health systems, including top academic medical centers (Cleveland Clinic, Mayo, Penn, Yale, Stanford, John’s Hopkin’s,) and large non-academic health systems (Advocate Aurora Health, Norton Healthcare), who were looking to share strategies to improve hospital-wide patient flow. The main theme we heard from hospitals in attendance was “surge planning is the new normal,” as these hospitals have been challenged with sustained high occupancy of their inpatient units leading to long emergency length of stay, high emergency department boarding, PACU & OR holding. The solutions presented included implementing hospital-wide surge policies, command centers/EPIC dashboards, and changing the corporate culture to break down silos between clinical & support areas, with the goal of reducing use of diversion as a recourse to solving flow problems, increasing situational awareness, improving hospital length of stay, and reducing discharge times.
