CASE STUDY

Vituity Collaborative Optimizes Emergency Department Throughput

High-volume emergency departments often struggle to improve throughput. An efficient emergency department ensures patient safety, improves clinical outcomes, and boosts your hospital’s bottom line. Learn how Vituity’s collaborative helped hospitals achieve their goals even through financial and staffing challenges.

Published June 12, 2024

Challenge

Minimize Emergency Department wait times and care delays

The healthcare system remains at or over capacity, leaving many hospitals struggling with how to meet patient demand. Overcrowding impacts patient mortality, quality of care, revenue, and physician engagement.

Common challenges include:

Improve discharge process
Expedite admissions and transfers
Boost clinician engagement by increasing efficiency
Increase patient satisfaction

Solution

Driving Change through Collaborative Learning

Vituity’s six-month emergency department throughput collaborative achieves proven results for high-volume departments. Participating teams work rapidly to identify challenges, develop solutions, implement initiatives, and share best practices in a structured setting away from their regular environments.

Our proven process:

Kickoff Event: Multidisciplinary teams of physicians, advanced providers, practice administrators, nurses and hospital leaders meet to review their data and identify improvement opportunities. Teams then design more efficient future states and draft implementation plans.
Team Collaboration: Back at their sites, teams implement changes over a six-month period. Work groups are created to meet weekly and evaluate progress.
Ongoing Support: Throughout the process, teams receive expert coaching and support from the collaborative staff and fellow participants.

Results

Faster, quality care for emergency department patients

In 2023 alone, Vituity's emergency department throughput collaborative implemented over 40 initiatives across 15 site locations.

Historically, almost all collaborative site locations have achieved:

At least 10% improvement in time-to-discharge
Improved time-to-provider and time-to-admission
A boost in their patient experience scores
Fewer patients leaving the ED before seeing a provider
Improved teamwork and interdisciplinary collaboration

Success Story

Peyton Manning Children’s Hospital

During the 2023 collaborative, the team at Peyton Manning Children’s Hospital (Indiana) achieved an astounding 34% reduction in turnaround times.

“In the first seven days of introducing our throughput initiatives with team assessment, evaluating our barriers, and focusing on movement, we have not just improved our times, but have completely crushed them. Our goal was to get to 110 minutes by November 2023. After seven days, our average time-to-discharge is 106 minutes.”

-- Jennifer Barker, MD, ED Medical Director

Conclusion

Vituity’s collaboratives are where some of our most innovative performance improvement work happens. Since 2013, our collaborative programs have been a critical component to our purpose to improve lives. We offer a variety of collaboratives each year including patient flow, patient experience, readmissions, team culture, advanced provider retention and length of stay.

Explore how Vituity can help identify solutions that address your challenges and improve performance.

Partnering to improve patient lives

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