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Patient Flow Metrics

In: Business and Management

Submitted By graju80
Words 1074
Pages 5
Patient Flow Metrics Paper
Southern New Hampshire University
HCM - 500

INTRODUCTION
Emergency Rooms and the waiting rooms associated to these emergency rooms are subject to many conversations of inefficiency. Dealing with these inefficiencies are two massive challenges that are facing the healthcare industry today. The wait times and dissatisfactions associated with going to a emergency room, definitely need to be curbed and addressed. Even when the system has patient flow that is simplified with pre determined appointments, and served by a single doctor there are various factors that are related to inefficiency. This flow does get a lot more complication with walk ins 24 hours a day in an emergency room setting. There are also no single doctor that serve the patient and there are no pre determined processing times. Doctors generally are rotated, while at work are constantly interrupted due to the nature of the emergency, and related to to other medical consultation. EHR (Electronic Health Records) are being installed and implemented in a number of hospitals and healthcare units, to achieve the goal of improving the quality and decreasing the costs.National benchmarking for quality in the ED setting places significant focus on timeliness, safety and efficiency standards, most directly reported as overall length of stay (LOS), door to doctor times and left without being seen, using them as proxies for quality measures that are difficult to collect, such as time to analgesia, antibiotics, and patient satisfaction. These metrics are very important to tackle the efficiency of patient care and the effects of the implementation of this system in one of the emergency system is the subject of this paper, which was done at the Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center Emergency Room in year 2009.

DEFINE
EHR was being implemented in the Emergency room during the

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