Forty-six minutes was just enough time to save the life of a new mother.
That’s the amount of time it took for her to be transported from a Baptist Memorial Health Care regional hospital emergency department to the intensive care unit at Baptist Memorial Hospital, Memphis, after she suffered a cardiac arrest following an emergency Cesarean section due to fetal distress.
Upon her arrival, specialists were able to save her life. A physician at the regional facility made one phone call to the Baptist Patient Placement Center (BPPC) and the nurses there arranged transportation for the patient, had a bed secured and contacted on-call specialists in a matter of minutes.
“The nurse who took the call stayed on the phone the entire time with the paramedic while the patient was transported,” said Deborah Hall, director of the BPPC. “This was not just about getting a patient a bed, it was about this mother living to see her new baby.”
In just a little over a year, Baptist has made the lives of patients, physicians and hospital staff easier by implementing the BPPC, which creates efficiencies, streamlines workflow throughout the hospital system and ultimately makes it easier for medical professionals to save lives.
The BPPC, which is staffed with registered nurses ranging in acute and emergency experience from seven to 39 years, tracks the status and manages all 2,700 hospital beds in the Baptist system and helps transfer and admit patients all from one location. In addition, nurses can dispatch air travel for a critical case, monitor calls, track calls, transfer volume and find capacity for a patient all from one location. This is accomplished via a series of monitors using a software system called TeleTracking.
“It’s a fully automated process,” Hall said. “All it takes is one phone call to get the patient’s information, determine what facility can service the patient best, see what beds are available and contact the on-call physician. It’s done in real time and in a matter of minutes.”
Katie Morrissette, administrator of TeleHealth at Baptist, said that prior to the creation of the BPPC, each hospital managed its own transfer and admissions process and nurses were not part of the procedure.
“It was a manual process, and it could take multiple calls to admit or transfer a patient,” Morrissette said. “There were patient delays, and it could be difficult to get in touch with an on-call physician. Now the nurses in the center can manage it all for every hospital in the system.”
Additionally, Morrissette said physicians from other area hospitals and physician offices may not know each Baptist hospital specialty. Now physicians have one number to call, and the nurse in the BPPC knows exactly where to send the patient, depending on the patient’s need.
The BPPC has made it easier for a physician when calling to admit or transfer a patient to a Baptist facility, according to Jerry Gooch, MD, medical director of the BPPC and a thoracic and cardiovascular surgeon.
He knows from experience. He called the BPPC from a Baptist regional facility to transfer a patient for critical surgery. Gooch said that one call to the BPPC had the patient transferred for surgery and the referring physician notified in only 90 minutes.
“The admissions and transfer process has been streamlined significantly,” Gooch said. “One call gets the ball rolling for the patient to be transferred. I have called other hospitals across the country to transfer or admit a patient and have had to make multiple calls. This cuts down on time, which means less delay for the patient.”
In addition to getting in touch with an on-call physician to accept a patient, the nurses in the BPPC can facilitate calls to multiple specialists for critical cases. Hall said this can save time when a patient must be transferred quickly to another hospital location.
Another advantage to the BPPC is that nurses can see what beds are available in each hospital at all times and can assign patients to available rooms at a click of a button. Nurses on the floor in each hospital can see when a patient is assigned a room, and they can begin the transfer process immediately. Additionally, after each patient is discharged, the environmental services team is notified that a room needs to be cleaned for a patient.
“Once a patient enters our system, we can track their transport in the system until they are discharged,” Morrissette said. “That way a bed can be turned over quickly. This helps especially when there is a high demand for a specific area. For instance, intensive care unit beds are usually the most needed.”
The TeleTracking system tracks everything from how long a patient waits in the emergency department for a room to how long it takes for a room to be cleaned when a patient is discharged. Morrissette said Baptist leadership reviews a monthly dashboard to drill down the metrics and find out what has improved and needs to be addressed.
“It’s an effective tool for managing efficiencies and changing up strategies,” Hall said. “We drill down the metrics system wide. We can predict our patient flow and bottlenecks and make adjustments.”
There have been many improvements over the past year, according to Morrissette. The average wait time for a patient to be assigned a bed from the emergency department is 17 minutes.
“Before it could take hours for a patient to be assigned a bed from the ED,” Gooch said. “Now the patient is assigned in minutes, which frees up the ED, so there is less waiting time.”
Additionally, hospital staff can identify when a room needs to be attended. Morrissette said this allows the environmental services department to redirect staff so a bed can be made available.
Also, more phone calls are coming through the BPPC from outside the Baptist system. Morrissette said 40 to 45 percent of calls are admissions from outside Baptist. This number has steadily gone up over the past year as more hospitals and physician offices have learned about the BPPC.
Although there have been many improvements to the system’s workflow, Hall said in the end it’s all about the patient.
“Even though the nurses in the center don’t see the patient face-to-face, they take each patient seriously. They are totally focused on seeing the patient is taken care of immediately, so they can get the care they need.”
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