Throughput Optimization Service

To help hospitals and health systems deal with patient flow congestion and its unfavorable effects, CareScience is offering its Throughput Optimization Service™. This unique consultative approach to redesigning patient flow increases patient throughput, creates newly available beds from existing resources, optimizes revenues, and improves patient care and safety.

The Throughput Optimization Service frees up capacity that is currently tied up in inefficient patient placement. We help clients leverage the technological and cognitive skills of their staff and build units around physicians, nurses, and other caregiver skills by grouping similar patients together:

• We examine strategic priorities in projecting capacity needs.
• We cluster patients to reduce diversity which results in less expensive and higher quality care.
• We allocate capacity by diseases or populations, not department or specialties.
• We develop capacity allocations on the basis of similarity of treatments among patients to promote specialization of units, competence of personnel, and concentration of resources to facilitate ancillary decentralization.
• We believe that capacity allocation is an ongoing process, not static.

CareScience is uniquely qualified to perform this type of restructuring engagement because we have the nation’s leading experience in using these techniques to restructure operating units to improve capacity management. We draw our Optimization Service from focused operations theory which states the more specialized a process is around technological and cognitive inputs, the less expensive and higher the quality that process will be. Our approach integrates focused operations methodologies pioneered at CareScience, client data, and best practices in allocating clinical services and operating units that are built around patient similarities and physician, nurse, and other caregiver skills.

If your organization is facing daily challenges in moving ICU patients to a step-down or general bed, if you are diverting emergency room patients to other hospitals, or if you simply have no available beds due to increased census, then the Throughput Optimization Service can help. By employing this process, you can target the capacity constraints that reduce your facility’s overall revenue while working to increase patient safety and employee satisfaction.