Under the umbrella of healthcare networks, tens of clinics and emergency rooms (ERs) might operate. Such huge healthcare organizations employ thousands of physicians and provide medical assistance to millions of inpatient and outpatient visits. Those networks that implement specialized emergency medical services analytics in their workflows report reductions in left-without-being-seen (LWBS) rates and save millions as a result of the cut costs. In this post, experts from the Belitsoft healthcare software development company share their thoughts about how analytics help to achieve improved outcomes in healthcare.
Emergency medical services analytics can bring healthcare organizations the required results. First, they can improve the throughput time of the emergency departments (EDs) and rooms. Second, they are able to comply with the national benchmarks, which as a result will lead to better patient outcomes and decreased expenses. Analytics tools bring all the stakeholders together and encourage them to cooperate to achieve the common goal of enhanced patient care.
On the contrary, without proper analytics platforms, providers fail to offer high-quality services because of overcrowded EDs and wasted resources.
What Challenges Do EDs Have to Address?
Healthcare organizations that cover the needs of densely populated regions face high numbers of ED visits. However, the personnel resources are often limited. As a result, providers deal with the following problems:
Productivity issues
- High visitor volumes and long wait times at EDs cause potential safety hazards and leave patients dissatisfied
- High throughput rates make it impossible for the providers to reach both internal and industry goals in the LWBS rates
- Poor organization of internal logistics increases the time between patients’ arrival at the ED and their transfer to a proper expert
- High throughput time is caused by disorganized procedures outside EDs, including delays in obtaining lab results and issues with the availability of rooms and beds.
Data restrictions
- Improvement becomes hard to implement due to limited access to data
- Lack of important details about the ED patient flows, arrival times, volumes of patients, and throughput indicators hinders enhancement efforts
- Absence of cooperation between departments complicates the development of general hospital-wide improvement route maps.
What Functionality Does Emergency Medical Services Analytics Offer?
Analytics software enables medical organizations to do the following:
- Compare and examine the data regarding daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly patient volume and ED arrival patterns
- Review the metrics that impact ED throughput, such as room cleaning timing, lab tests and image descriptions obtaining times, patient transportation, length of stay (LOS) rates, occupancy rates, and patient volumes
- Determine the peak patient arrival times
- Review standard protocols for ordering diagnostic tests, including laboratory and imaging, even without a spare ED bed
- Indicate the statuses of the current staff occupancy with colored labels on the dashboard.
How to Get Prepared for a New Analytics?
Analytics applications are able to help companies achieve sustainable results. However, additional organizational measures are important for smooth integration.
Leadership involvement
- Hospital executives should participate in addressing ED throughput issues to make sure proper care is offered and patient experience improves
- It is important for the organization leaders to appoint an interdisciplinary team of experts who will cooperate for improvements. The team should include various experts, such as ED physicians and nurses, members of the laboratories and radiology departments, and data analytics specialists. Together they should contribute to the development of the hospital-wide strategy for ED throughput enhancement
- Hospital leaders should track the performance indicators and arrange regular daily meetings with stakeholders to discuss progress.
Staff contribution
- It is recommended for the leadership to collect staff feedback and use the insights for care practices and ED throughout improvements.
Workflow optimization
- It is important for better throughout times to timely notify the nursing and environmental staff of the nearest patient discharges
- Nursing staff should help patients complete all the procedures before the discharge, and environmental services experts should clean the room for the next patient on time.
What Are the Benefits of Implementing Emergency Medical Services Analytics?
Healthcare providers that have already tried emergency medical services analytics to improve their LWBS and LOS rates report the following results:
Financial outcomes
- Relative reduction of the LWBS rate guaranteed more than $1 million in savings.
Efficiency outcomes
- Significant shortening of the time spent in the EDs after the arrival and before the first contact with a doctor
- ED LOS decreases
- Less time wasted between patient admission orders and transferring them to the inpatient beds and between the discharge order and patient departures.
Routine workflow outcomes
- Patients are interviewed and assessed faster as ED beds are taken immediately after their arrival
- Setting time frames for patient discharges motivates nurses to organize discharge procedures and avoid delays with new arrivals from EDs
- Timely cleaning of the rooms after patient discharge guarantees swift room turnover
- Clear hospital staff management is facilitated with colored statuses of the application that indicate the workload of the staff and occupancy.
Facility and resource management outcomes
- Additional rooms for patients of the EDs allow for passing diagnostic tests through standard protocols when ED beds are occupied
- Creating special treatment space that ED staff can use at peak times for different types of care
- Arranging more nursing staff to EDs to efficiently manage patient arrivals
- Additional experts at the triage area at peak times can speed up the process of patient assessment.
How Can a Healthcare Software Development Company Assist?
An outsourcing company like Belitsoft which specializes in healthcare software development helps data analytics companies and healthtech vendors to create powerful data operating systems.
Healthcare software development firms build integrated data platforms that enable the collection, storage, processing, and analysis of substantial amounts of EMR data, data from patient management systems, lab and financial systems, and more. These platforms provide the following capabilities:
- Automate data processing workflows (cleansing, standardization, and normalization)
- Configure scalable data warehouses
- Establish and deploy analytical tools for developing dashboards, reports, and data visualizations
- Maintain a strong level of data security and adhere to healthcare regulations, including HIPAA compliance
- Integrate machine learning and AI into analytics.
Healthtech companies also develop special apps according to companies’ requests. Emergency Medical Services Analytics can be among them. It performs the following features:
- Employing real-time information to facilitate a thorough analysis and research
- Monitoring performance metrics related to laboratory tests, LOS, utilization of care units, etc.
- Compiling detailed reports for clinical management practices
- Sorting the data by time of day, day of the week, month, and year
- Classifying the data based on payer, provider, and patient information
- Visualizing facility performance indicators, such as LWBS rates, arrival patterns, etc.
- Illustrating patient volume and throughput summaries in charts with metrics like LWBS rates, arrival times, times spent between admission and arrival at an inpatient bed, as well as times between discharge and exiting the emergency department (ED), etc.
If you are in search of expertise in data analysis, data architecture, workflow design, data systems, HL7 interfaces, and development within cloud platforms like AWS, Google Cloud, or Azure, as well as in hybrid or on-premises environments, a healthcare software development company like Belitsoft can meet these needs.
