Overview
Baycare Health System's Mease Countryside hospital was diverting emergency patients into other hospitals due to a lack of available in-house beds. So it only made sense to charter a project that aimed to increase the speed of inpatient discharges. The faster the hospital could discharge its patients from rooms, the more capacity it had to accommodate incoming patients from the emergency room. The team used such techniques as a Pareto Chart to hone in on the reasons discharges were delayed sometimes--including "patients waiting for a ride home" and "nurses busy discharging others." Aiming sat upstream process control, new procedures were installed. The project team met its goal of increasing (by 25%) the number of discharges that take one hour or less.