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Before we even had TeleTeletracking we were all on paper.
And on one campus it was well over an hour to get a bed assignment, and close to an hour
on the other campus. That was just the time from that the bed was
requested to the time the bed assignment was made.
And a lot of that had to do with all the phone calls that went on, negotiating behind the
scenes and hunting down missing and hidden beds.
And now with TeleTracking in place, everything's electronic, fewer phone calls, we've gotten
that down to 15 minutes.
I think the data has really helped with the cultural changes.
We still had a lot of hidden beds, people trying to hide beds, but we had the data now
that we could go back and show them that we knew it was happening, it wasn't being done
clandestinely any more, we could really address the problems with the data.
And we were really able to reduce that. And finally able to get our patients assigned
and into their appropriate bed much more quickly. A lot of the units felt like they were getting
all of the ED admissions for example in one night.
It was just them, it was all about them. And having this system in place they were
really able to see and visualize that they weren't the only units that were getting the
ED patients. The data and reporting tools have been phenomenonal.
We were on paper before so getting those ED boarder times or bed-request-to-assign times
really was painstaking, having to go through and enter in that data manually and to do
the analysis, whereas now you run a quick report and you have everything at your fingertips.
So we increased by 25% our ED volume and our ED admission volume into the hospital one
one campus, and about 17% or so on the other campus.
And we've also been decreasing the overall length of stay in the ED and for those ED-admitted
patients. So even though we're seeing more patients
we're seeing them a lot more efficiently and a lot more faster.
We had over 100 minutes on one campus, patients were being boarded and held.
And averages, you're going to have kids being held in there much longer than that 100 minutes
and to us that's just completely unacceptable. We knew that they needed to get to the next
level of care. We've got kids waiting in the emergency department
waiting room who haven't even been back, who haven't even seen a physician yet and those
are the kids that we're really concerned about. It's down to about 52 minutes on average so
we've reduced that by at least 50%. So we look at it in terms of, "How many more
patients can we see in the emergency department? And what can we charge that patient for going
through the emergency department?" So on one campus we were able to save $2.7
million and on the other campus $2.2 million. And that's big to our system, and for a state
that probably has the highest level of uninsured in the country.