Acute Care continues to face severe burdens from overcrowding, backlogs for surgery, staffing shortages, complex patient increases and the list goes on. These inhibitors place the needs of patients at a greater risk of their conditions worsening as they wait, increased recovery time due to lengthy wait times, and inadequate support at critical stages in their healthcare journey. As daunting as this seems, it is fixable.
The intent for acute care is to provide short term immediate treatment for severe injuries or episodic events requiring urgent medical attention. Some of the services under Acute Care include:
Patients are not surprised and are almost numb to prolonged waits, typical surgical wait times in Canada are averaging four months and longer. Our healthcare providers are doing their best with what they have to deliver the best possible care and outcomes, often to a heroic level. Common complaints from healthcare professionals and those in need of urgent medical care include:
On average 17 – 20% (CIHI data) of inpatient beds are holding alternative level of care (ALC) patients, creating inefficient movement through healthcare facilities and inappropriate use of Acute care resources. This practise has lead to delays, bottlenecks, and resource mismanagement.
On average of 20% (CIHI data) of Emergency Department (ED) beds hold “admitted no bed” patients. This reduces the ED capacity and creates extended waiting room periods for other emergency room patients to receive medical treatment.
Hospital beds are occupied by patients who no longer require acute care but cannot be discharged due to various reasons, such as delays in arranging post-hospital care or awaiting further non-urgent medical evaluations.
The inability to see a mental health patient during a minor crisis, leads them now to waiting days to see a clinician, tends to lead them to now require one-on-one support or being admitted to hospital because these cases have moved from urgent to an emergent level of care.
The strain on Acute Care systems is exacerbated by the rising prevalence of chronic health conditions. These stem from inconsistent or lack of access to supportive primary care, resulting in frequent visits to the ED.
Patients face long wait times for a scheduled surgery due to high demand, limited resources, insufficient staffing, inappropriate requests, and administrative inefficiencies in healthcare systems.
Patients receive medical treatment and care while they are positioned in hospital hallways due to overcrowding and limited bed availability in patient rooms.
Through strategic analysis and implementation of optimized processes we can streamline communications between in-hospital and community resources, reduce unnecessary testing, reduce wait times, increase timely access to community supports, and significantly improving discharge procedures.
All of these improvements can facilitate smoother patient transitions throughout their healthcare journey and free up patient beds.
Our in-depth analysis of your current EMR and business processes will reveal areas of opportunity to reduce EMR administration. Areas for improvement include: optimizing templates, automating repetitive tasks, and integrating third-party applications to streamline documentation processes.
By utilizing process mapping and data-driven insights, we streamline workflows, eliminate redundancies, and identify automation opportunities. We understand healthcare outcome requirements and employ process improvement in operations and design thinking principles to create intuitive process flows. These process improvements free up clinicians’ time for patient care and reduce administrative burdens.
With a clear understanding of your current processes and workflows, we identify unnecessary procedures, bottlenecks and inefficiencies contributing to prolonged wait times. We use these findings to develop and implement tailored solutions to streamline patient flow, such as pooled referrals, optimizing scheduling procedures, connecting to community supports, enhancing triage protocols, and improving communication among healthcare staff.
