A new 6,000-square-foot hospital operations center at Children's Mercy Kansas City uses artificial intelligence, predictive analytics and real-time information to optimize care coordination from the time of patient's admission until discharge.

WHY IT MATTERS

Children's Mercy said the center – modeled after NASA's mission control – will localize team members to break down bottlenecks, identify potential barriers and increase patient satisfaction as they advance through their patient journeys.

"Making better-informed decisions leads to better outcomes for our patients, families and our staff," Paul Kempinski, president and chief executive officer of Children's Mercy, said in Monday's announcement.

The hospital is the first freestanding pediatric hospital in the U.S. to collaborate with GE HealthCare on patient flow technology. 

"By maximizing the use of actionable, real-time and predictive data, we will improve the experience of our patients, families and team members alike," said Kempinski.

Children's Mercy says that the Patient Progression Hub offers: 

• Centralized bed placement for managing bed assignment workflows and placing external transfers in a timely manner.
• Real-time data for addressing patient wait times in the emergency department or the post-anesthesia care unit.
• Patient census level analytics that can predict staffing needs 24 and 48 hours in advance.
• Patient journey tracking with real-time data and predictive analytics that enable clinicians to prioritize tests, procedures and medicines in order to streamline the discharge process.

"The Patient Progression Hub journey enables endless possibilities for using real-time data to drive actions that deliver excellent patient care and supports our team members," added Jodi Coombs, executive vice president and chief operating officer at Children's Mercy.

THE LARGER TREND

Last year GE Healthcare announced a digital health platform to deploy clinical, workflow, analytics and AI tools designed to improve care and boost revenue.

"With easy access to the workflow, analytics and clinical apps specific to care across the care continuum, clinicians will have actionable insights at their fingertips to help better serve their patients," Amit Phadnis, chief digital officer at GE Healthcare, said in that announcement.

Streamlining the patient journey and discharge process is an important focus of hospital efficiency. During COVID-19, many hospitals realized they needed to improve their length of stay metrics. 

"We needed to automate this process to gain real-time insights and create meaningful impact by reducing avoidable days and lengths of stay," Patti Canitano, division director of patient throughput at Health First, told Healthcare IT News. 

The 900-bed, four-hospital system in Central Florida also established predictive hospital operations. 

"Inefficiencies came to a head during COVID-19. Accurate, timely and proactive operations were more crucial than ever. We needed to optimize length-of-stay management to better plan for capacity constraints, avoid capacity expansion and track our COVID patients versus the normal population," she said.

ON THE RECORD

"Prior to implementation, the organization relied on manual processes and often retrospective data to understand patient census and anticipate discharges," Coombs said in the statement. 

"Now we have visibility into operations across the entire system to make faster and smarter complex decisions as soon as vital workflows change."

Dr. Robert Lane, executive vice president and physician-in-chief added, "Most patients and families won't even know the command center exists, but they will significantly feel the impact – less waiting around for a bed and getting discharged quicker so they can go home that much sooner."

Andrea Fox is senior editor of Healthcare IT News.
Email: afox@himss.org
Healthcare IT News is a HIMSS Media publication.