Yale New Haven Hospital Partners With Epic On Centralized Operations Center

Info, info, all around, and not a place to manage it all. That’s the dilemma faced by most hospitals as they work to leverage the massive data stores they’re accumulating in their health IT systems.

Yale New Haven Hospital’s solution to the problem is to create a centralized operations center which connects the right people to real-time data analytics. Its Capacity Command Center (nifty alliteration, folks!) was created by YNHH, Epic and the YNHH Clinical Redesign Initiative.

The Command Center project comes five years into YNHH’s long-term High Reliability project, which is designed to prepare the institution for future challenges. These efforts are focused not only on care quality and patient safety but also managing what YNHH says are the highest patient volumes in Connecticut. Its statement also notes that with transfers from other hospitals increasing, the hospital is seeing a growth in patient acuity, which is obviously another challenge it must address.

The Capacity Command Center’s functions are fairly straightforward, though they have to have been a beast to develop.

On the one hand, the Center offers technology which sorts through the flood of operational data generated by and stored in its Epic system, generating dashboards which change in real time and drive process changes. These dashboards present real-time metrics such as bed capacity, delays for procedures and tests and ambulatory utilization, which are made available on Center screens as well as within Epic.

In addition, YNHH has brought representatives from all of the relevant operational areas into a single physical location, including bed management, the Emergency Department, nursing staffing, environmental services and patient transport. Not only is this a good approach overall, it’s particularly helpful when patient admissions levels climb precipitously, the hospital notes.

This model is already having a positive impact on the care process, according to YNHH’s statement. For example, it notes, infection prevention staffers can now identify all patients with Foley catheters and review their charts. With this knowledge in hand, these staffers can discuss whether the patient is ready to have the catheter removed and avoid related urinary tract infections associated with prolonged use.

I don’t know about you, but I was excited to read about this initiative. It sounds like YNHH is doing exactly what it should do to get more out of patient data. For example, I was glad to read that the dashboard offered real-time analytics options rather than one-off projections from old data. Bringing key operational players together in one place makes great sense as well.

Of course, not all hospitals will have the resources to pull something off something like this. YNHH is a 1,541-bed giant which had the cash to take on a command center project. Few community hospitals would have the staff or money to make such a thing happen. Still, it’s good to see somebody at the cutting edge.

About the author

Anne Zieger

Anne Zieger is a healthcare journalist who has written about the industry for 30 years. Her work has appeared in all of the leading healthcare industry publications, and she's served as editor in chief of several healthcare B2B sites.

   

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