Turning the ED into Your Hospital's New Front Door

Session
Emergency Services

Authors
Robert Gift
Practice Manager
IMA Consulting

Renee E. Sharp
RN, BS, MBA, CEN
Senior Conaulting Manager
IMA Consulting

Description
This session presents the experience of turning the performance of an urban Emergency Department from a back of the building embarrassment into the primary source of satisfied patients. Presenters will review the techniques used to achieve breakthrough performance in improving stakeholder satisfaction, reducing delays, eliminating diversion, and improving costs.

Abstract
This session will begin with recounting the challenges faced by the ED, both those unique to the hospital and those facing EDs across the country. Part of those challenges lie in the results achieved by the ED long delays in service, low patient, associate, and physician satisfaction, high associate turnover and vacancy rates, significant hours on diversion. Through the application of techniques, departmental leadership uncovered the root causes of problems, allowing the team to address them, rather than deal with symptomatic issues, as had been past practice. While analytics and scientific problem solving played critical roles in the journey to improvement, building collaboration among physicians, nursing staff, hospital staff, and administration proved to be more significant in promoting improved outcomes. These improvements include, among others: decreasing the percent of patients that left without from 7.1% per month to 3.5%, increasing patient satisfaction from 74% to 92%, decreasing diversions for ambulance traffic to an average of less than one hour per month, reducing the vacancy rate for registered nurses from an average of 9.0% to 2.5%, increasing net patient services revenue capture by an average of $15,000 per month, and increasing patient visits by 3%.