SPRINGFIELD, MO – Hospitals across the country like St. John’s Mercy are collecting information on patient flow from the emergency department on, fixing bottlenecks in hospital traffic.

“The problem was that our operating rooms were completely blocked. Emergency cases had to wait until the elective cases were finished,” said Christina Dempsey, VP of perioperative and emergency services at St. John’s Mercy.

The 866-bed hospital collected data on its care services and applied variability management principles to change its operating schedule and add an operating room for unscheduled procedures, raising its inpatient capacity by 59 percent.

“You need smooth elective admissions and reliable IT systems to provide electronic information about the status of bed availability,” said Eugene Litvak, MD, professor of operations management at Boston University’s Health Policy Institute, who worked with St. John’s Mercy to manage its patient flow.

Discharge procedure has become another area of concern for hospitals like Swedish Medical Center in Seattle and Seton Healthcare Network in Austin, Texas, which both experienced strained nursing staffs and prolonged wait times for patient discharge.

Both facilities purchased technology from Extended Care Information Networks that automates referral requests sent to a national database of post-acute care facilities, reducing manual time spent by hospital staff to find post-acute care beds for discharged patients.

“It frees up staff from referral work. We have shaved a whole day off a patient’s length of stay. Our response time from a post-acute care facility can be within 30 seconds,” said Fran Stelly, a case operations manager at Seton Healthcare Network.

Swedish Medical Center also saw improvement, using ECIN’s discharge and case management technologies. “We didn’t have a way to collect data on referral patterns. But now it is all about efficiency,” said Dee Mann Aust, director of care coordination at Swedish Medical Center.

More hospitals are looking for ways to smooth their patient flows adding beds or staff. “Patient flow hasn’t been a big focus of management in the past,” said Kathleen Fuda, data analysis manager at Boston University’s Health Policy Institute, which collected data on St. John’s Mercy Hospital’s variability.

“Many information systems aren’t designed to help monitor (patient flow), but hospitals are starting to understand the reasons behind ED overcrowding,” Fuda said.