Plugging into the

A patient that walks into a hospital lobby better be prepared to take a magazine and wait. Unfortunately, this is a scenario that plays out for a significant percentage of hospital admissions. When a patient is medically stable enough to present at the admissions desk or transfer from an outpatient clinic, there is really only one major hurdle standing in the way of the patient getting into an inpatient bed – the availability of the bed itself.

For too many hospitals, the Admission/ Discharge/ Transfer (ADT) process involves too much manual updating of information, and does not give nurses the tools they need to quickly and easily manage bed status and patient throughput logistics. The "process" most hospitals use consists of nurses making several phone calls, with increasing frustration, until beds can be freed up for the next patient. Some hospitals are even stuck using paperbased bed boards to manage the information that is so vital to their daily operations.

Several vendors offer technology-based solutions to the bed management process. While the purchase of an expensive off-the-shelf bed tracking software package can provide great improvements to data availability, these solutions do nothing to address the people and processes that are instrumental in driving patient flow.

More Than Software

Crothall Services Group provides a comprehensive patient throughput solution that includes centralized Patient Transportation to move patients into and out of the hospital, Environmental Services to immediately respond to cleaning requests, improving bed turnaround times, and TeamCHIMES software to manage these tasks and provide instant communication to hospital staff. The advantage of Crothall's solution over purely software-based bed tracking packages is that our people drive the process, prioritize tasks, and ensure that the entire system is running smoothly.

The partnership Crothall has established with Awarix (now part of McKesson Corporation) brings an even greater layer of visibility to patient throughput management. The Awarix system, connected to TeamCHIMES, displays real-time bed availability as well as offering an enterprise visibility system for patient status, including clinical and other measures, giving nurses unprecedented control over patient management.

The Crothall solution with TeamCHIMES eliminates multiple calls by nursing. Every step in the ADT process can be linked, so that a transport request triggers a cleaning task, which updates the bed board. It is a highly intelligent system because it is managed by our trained on-site staff who not only organize tasks, but also ensure that the support services are performed expertly, guaranteeing the highest quality and efficiency. The accompanying process flow diagram demonstrates the advantages of our comprehensive turnkey system over the manual process that is still in place at far too many hospitals.