Product Description
Edited by Eugene Litvak, Ph.D., a world-renowned leader in hospital operations management and redesign.
Foreword by Dr. Harvey Fineberg, president of the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation and former president of the Institute of Medicine.
Optimizing patient flow impacts patient safety and the quality of care, and it has financial implications for health care institutions. Yet the story hasn't changed much in the decades that patient flow has been a focus of health care administrators. Hospitals are straining to meet demand. Surgeries continue to be delayed. Ambulances are diverted. Emergency departments are overcrowded while waiting for inpatient beds. Staffing shortages and economic challenges only serve to exacerbate the inefficiencies of patient flow. Perhaps this approach to managing patient flow is not the best one.
Crowded emergency departments and empty operating rooms are indicative of the variability in patient flow throughout the hospital, including emergency rooms and ICUs, as well as the flow to other settings of care, such as home care. Our second title edited by patient flow expert Dr. Eugene Litvak, Optimizing Patient Flow: Advanced Strategies for Managing Variability to Enhance Access, Quality, and Safety, offers readers innovative techniques for optimizing patient flow and improving operations management while providing clear examples of successful implementation. It can help you optimize patient flow in your own organization.
This book goes beyond the introductory information provided in JCR’s popular Managing Patient Flow in Hospitals: Strategies and Solutions, Second Edition. Dr. Litvak has teamed with CEOs, doctors, and researchers who have compiled their own experiences with patient flow to produce a book that guides the reader to practical and achievable advances in patient flow by sharing stories of how it was attained in actual health care organizations and providing specific approaches to reducing and managing variability.
Key Topics
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Reducing and managing natural and artificial variability
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Smoothing and optimizing the admissions process and surgical flow
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Capacity planning and queue management strategies
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Assessing the quantitative impact of patient flow issues on patients and staff
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Standardizing patient admission, transfer, and discharge
Key Features
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Hospital CEOs share their actual experiences implementing patient flow measures
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Researchers present the “nuts and bolts” of the mechanics of patient flow
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Real-life case studies illustrate how improved patient flow impacts emergency departments, telemetry bed utilization, and post-acute care
Standards: No direct standards correlations, but related to Leadership and Performance Improvement
Setting: Hospitals, critical access hospital, home care
Key Audience
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Hospital executives including chief operating officers and chief financial officers
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Board members
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Physicians and medical officers
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Nurses and nurse executives
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Quality, process improvement, and productivity managers
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Emergency department, surgery, critical care, and nursing operations professionals
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