HARTFORD, CT – Hartford Hospital, an 867-bed regional teaching hospital and referral center, has increased its early discharge rate nearly three-fold after offering its clinicians access to a business intelligence dashboard from Scottsdale, Ariz.-based Carefx.
 
“As part of our multidisciplinary program to improve performance and quality, our clinicians rely on Carefx’s Patient Throughput Dashboard to pinpoint patient flow trends and opportunities, which has enabled the hospital to accelerate appropriate discharge and cut length of stay,” said Michael C. Lindberg, MD, chairman, department of medicine, at Hartford Hospital. “Instead of having to contend with multiple data sources, access delays, and dull, text-based presentations, clinicians use the dashboard to view and act upon near real-time patient flow data in a lively, intuitive, graphical format.”

[See also: Carefx to commercialize Cleveland Clinic biz intelligence dashboards.]

Originally developed by Cleveland Clinic, and now licensed and deployed by Carefx, the Patient Throughput Dashboard is one of Carefx’s Business Intelligence Solutions. Other dashboards include those for physician scorecards, mortality, core measures, patient experience, clinician performance on AHRQ indicators, length-of-stay, and readmission rates.
 
The Patient Throughput Dashboard presents a healthcare organization’s own aggregated data, allowing clinicians and executives to quickly identify improvement opportunities, eliminate operational bottlenecks, improve bed utilization and control length of stay.
 
“The Carefx Patient Throughput Dashboard helps hospitals manage daily census, lower cost-per-case, improve patient satisfaction, and minimize operational inefficiencies,” said Andrew Hurd, CEO, Carefx. “These dashboards will help providers respond to reimbursement challenges, marketplace shifts, and financial constraints.”

[See also: Case Studies: Streamline Healthcare Data Delivery Through Advanced Dashboards.]
 
Hartford Hospital uses a weekly feed to pull inpatient and emergency department (ED) data from billing, bed management and transport systems into its Patient Throughput Dashboard.  Clinicians and executives then use the data to hone in on patient flow obstacles and identify best practices for training and coaching lower-performing individuals, units and floors. 
 
After only nine months of using the new dashboard, users were surveyed and:

• 70 percent reported they were actively using dashboards (weekly)
• 90 percent claimed improved ability to manage workflow
• 100 percent claimed dashboard saved them time on data gathering, report generation

 
The Patient Throughput Dashboard also tracks the hospital’s progress on early discharge goals, triggering conversations among clinicians, managers and executives about how the hospital can increase early discharge through activities such as early tray delivery or movement of patients from the ED to less-critical care floors.

“The Patient Throughput Dashboard allows us to identify and diagnose problem areas and floors so we can invest resources to enhance patient flow,” adds Jamie Roche, MD, vice president, patient safety & quality at Hartford Hospital, and one of the executive sponsors of the project. “The dashboard’s real-time metrics help us to comply with Ongoing Professional Practice Evaluation (OPPE) standards, offer physicians immediate feedback on length of stay, readmissions and order entry and provide the Joint Commission with precise, accurate feedback on progress.”