HIMSS has awarded New York’s Hospital for Special Surgery the 2018 HIMSS Davies Enterprise Award for its work improving its bed management process and average pathway length of stay adherence.

Many healthcare organizations wrestle with challenges related to patient volume on a regular basis. Seeking revamped strategies to address these challenges, the Hospital for Special Surgery focused on ways to improve clinical pathway management and their bed planning process.

Significant operational challenges

Patient access services at the Hospital for Special Surgery are tasked with bed management for nearly 19,000 orthopedic inpatient surgeries annually – requiring close monitoring of bed utilization to accommodate patient volume, HIMSS explained. A census report on hospital beds was issued to the Hospital for Special Surgery leadership and operational owners four times per day using manual data collection, which presented significant operational challenges.

In addition, length of stay adherence required improvements. At the Hospital for Special Surgery, clinical pathways are procedure-specific post-op order sets that establish best practices by coordinating and standardizing care, HIMSS explained. They are made up of time-based goals and milestones for the interdisciplinary care of a defined patient group; the pathways were created to reduce variation in care and increase value for similar patient groups, HIMSS said.

Pathway performance is measured as pathway length of stay adherence. If all Hospital for Special Surgery patients adhere to pathways, capacity would improve significantly.

The organization worked to address this using a multipronged approach including electronic health records enhancements, new reporting capabilities and other process improvements. To transform the bed-planning process at the Hospital for Special Surgery, operational and IT leadership decided to leverage a capacity management dashboard.

To improve pathway adherence, an interdisciplinary project team determined top contributors to adherence and implemented operational changes, HIMSS stated. Several EHR changes were required to operationalize the new process.

As a result, the Hospital for Special Surgery was able to improve its bed management process and average pathway length of stay adherence, which led to improved bed capacity for surgical cases and increased patient access services staff efficiency, HIMSS said.

The HIMSS Davies Award

The HIMSS Davies Award of Excellence recognizes outstanding achievement of organizations that have used health information technology to substantially improve patient outcomes and value. The award is the pinnacle of the HIMSS Value Recognition Program and highlights organizations promoting health information and technology-enabled improvements in patient and business outcomes through sharing evidence-driven best practices on implementation strategies, workflow design, change management and patient engagement.

"Hospital for Special Surgery is the first orthopedic specialty hospital to receive the Davies Award," said Jonathan French, senior director of quality and value-based care at HIMSS. "With a high demand and global market for their services, the hospital successfully used information and technology to streamline access to critical services for their patients."

The provider organization said it is honored to be recognized as a recipient of the 2018 HIMSS Davies Enterprise Award.

"This is truly a testament to teamwork, collaboration and leveraging health information technology to improve processes, and ultimately patient care outcomes," said Jamie Nelson, senior vice president and CIO at the Hospital for Special Surgery.

The Hospital for Special Surgery will be recognized during HIMSS19, February 11-15 in Orlando, Florida.

Twitter: @SiwickiHealthIT
Email the writer: bill.siwicki@himssmedia.com