What if every Emergency Department (ED) within SSM Health
Care had a tool that gave them near real-time information that could help
decrease the time patients spend waiting for care while making the overall
emergency room experience more efficient? A new feature in SSM Health Care’s
electronic health record (EHR) system gives emergency teams exactly that and
more.
According to Roger Staten, Epic ASAP Product Specialist, the
new “dashboards” are tools that can help teams objectively identify and improve
patient movement through the emergency department. Staten worked with George Benard, Director,
Healthplex Emergency Services to develop and pilot the dashboards in SSM’s
Oklahoma City market where the program has already demonstrated improvements in
moving patients through the emergency experience.
Bernard says when St. Anthony Hospital transitioned to EHR he
recognized a huge gap between real time and the reports they were using to make
decisions that sometimes came weeks later.
“If we are retroactive and not proactive in operations, then
it doesn’t help us,” he noted. “So what the dashboard does is show us a true
pulse of the ED all the time.”
The computer based dashboard provides quick-read indicators
on the various points along a patients ED path. ED teams can see green lights
where things are flowing as planned and yellow or red lights on areas that may
need attention.
“So instead of having to wait 24 hours to run the numbers
you can look at it currently and deploy resources where they are needed,” says
Elizabeth Moore , Clinical Support Nurse at SSM St. Clare Health Center’s ED
Staten says to think of the dashboard like a TV. When
breaking news is happening sometimes you flip to different channels on you TV
to get different viewpoints.
“The various segments that make up a patient’s ED visit are
like your different channels,” he said. “In this particular case the channels
are things like – the waiting room, triage and most importantly various
critical points along the path that paint a picture of a patient’s stay in the
ED.”
With the dashboard ED teams can now view near real time numbers
for such things as how long it takes to move a patient from: door-to-triage;
triage to room; time from room assignment until a physician sees them and time
from when physician sees them to when they make a decision on discharge,
admission or transfer. Combined these “channels” provide an overview of the
total length of the patient experience.
The demonstrated success of the dashboard resulted in a decision
to deploy the new tool across the entire SSM Health Care system. All hospitals
currently utilizing the EHR system can now access the dashboard.