Command Centre And Imaging Tile At Humber River Hospital

13 November, 2020

With a rapidly growing community exceeding 850,000 residents, and rising ED volumes topping 400 per day, Toronto’s Humber River Hospital (HRH) determined in 2016 it would be facing a capacity shortfall of 40-50 medicine beds by the year 2020, despite the opening of a larger and digitally advanced replacement hospital in 2017.

Humber River subsequently engaged GE Healthcare to establish a hospital command centre that would help enable patient flow, better patient care logistics and the delivery of high reliability healthcare.

One of Humber River’s 21 command centre analytics is the Medical Imaging Tile, which notes in real time when an ordered inpatient imaging exam remains unscheduled too long, when the order is for a critical care patient or a patient ready for discharge, or when the exam needs to be coordinated with other exams when the patient has multiple exam orders.

An artificially intelligent algorithm dynamically prioritizes the queue of unscheduled inpatient exams based on a methodology provided by the hospital and suggests optimal times during which to schedule the inpatients, accounting for the real time status of how scheduled outpatients and already scheduled inpatients are progressing.

Information on the Tile is promptly actioned by the Imaging Expediter role within the command centre team. This team member, a Medical Imaging Technologist, uses their expertise and relationships with the modality teams and physicians as they work the Tile throughout the day to progress inpatient scans, reduce care delays, reduce unnecessary patient days and enable some patients to go home sooner.

Since implementing the Medical Imaging Tile, Humber River has seen a 16-27% reduction in the average time inpatients wait for medical imaging exams, depending on the modality.

Inpatients are receiving a better patient experience as the Tile helps ensure they receive their exams in a timely way. Hospitalists and other caregivers are more satisfied now that they no longer need to track down contacts across the different modalities to see when their inpatients can get scanned.

They now have confidence that their inpatient imaging orders are being actively managed throughout the day, intelligently, and with a level of efficiency not previously possible.