Managing Regional Transfer Capacity

Overview

As hospital capacity continues to be strained, there is a natural instinct to deprioritize patients not yet within the hospital setting. However, in many instances, these patients have more urgent needs given the services available in the outside hospitals compared to the tertiary care setting. Transfer Centers are often ‘caught in the middle’ between balancing the community needs with the current organizational pressures that are within the walls at any given time. This segment will explore how one organization was able to improve patient access the first year of their Command Center journey and bring in an additional 2000 patients (a 20% increase Y-o-Y). Hear how their use of real-time capacity status enhanced visibility and coordination with a capacity management system to guide the decision-making process. See the journey to using multiple sites of care to decant typical bottlenecks and balance system resources, and discover how an acuity triage system helps to sequence patients at the right time -- which at times may mean not transferring the patient at all.