Children's Hospitals Today - Fall 2023 - 28

FEATURE / TECHNOLOGY
Navigating through space and time
Data-informed
THE TEAM OF highly trained professionals
attend to their stations in the
6,000-square-foot operations
staffing. AI funccenter,
consuming
a constant stream of data
from a massive wall of charts, graphs
and maps. Their mission: Ensure the
people in their care get home as quickly
and safely as possible. While this buzzing
nerve center could be mistaken for
NASA mission control, it's actually the
Patient Progression Hub at Children's
Mercy Kansas City.
tionality provides highly accurate
census projections up to 48 hours
in advance, enabling Children's
Mercy to align staffing levels with
patient demand.
Bed management. Managing bed assignments
from one central location
streamlines prioritization and shortens
wait times for transfers.
Avoiding delays. Real-time data
alerts hub staff to head off potential
A vital component of the Patient
Progression Hub is having all key
stakeholders in the same space, sharing
the same real-time information
and breaking down the silos that bog
down patient flow. " You've got all of
the right people - physician, nurse,
care management,
nursing
transfer
supervisors,
center,
EVS-sitting
together to problem solve and make
things happen, " says Jennifer Watts,
M.D., MPH, emergency medicine physician
and chief patient progression
medical officer at Children's Mercy.
Length-of-stay metrics are trending
A multidisciplinary
team of clinicians
and staff continually
monitor key metrics.
downward since the hub launched, although
it's too early to correlate those
improvements with the new center,
Watts says. But she traces an intangible
benefit to the hub. " At a time
when burnout is so high in health
care and we have people struggling to
stay in the field, I saw people become
reinvigorated when we launched the
hub - they want to be part of the
solution, " Watts says. " It's sparked innovation
and joy in people we didn't
have before. "
Watts expects that enthusiasm
to last since Children's Mercy is
only scratching the surface of the
technology's capabilities. The vast
data-gathering and predictive analysis
functionalities of the hub software
could lead to broader process
improvements at the hospital that
profoundly impact community health
Children's Mercy launched the
hub in April 2023 to streamline a patient's
care from their initial referral
through their discharge. Aggregating
real-time data from multiple systems
into one command center, the Patient
Progression Hub uses artificial intelligence
and predictive analytics to optimize
patient care flow. The state-of-theart
technology provides improvements
across the care cycle:
delays across the organization, such as
reducing wait times for patients in the
Emergency Department or the PostAnesthesia
Care Unit (PACU) who are
awaiting an inpatient bed.
Discharge
process.
Up-to-theminute
patient tracking and predictive
analytics help clinicians streamline
the tests and procedures needed
to discharge a patient, freeing up a bed
for a new patient more quickly.
as a whole.
" The future of this technology for
us is really endless, " says Stephanie
Meyer, RN, MS-FNP, NEA-BC, senior
vice president and chief nursing officer.
" To be able to look at health
disparities and where we need to put
more resources and how that's going
to affect our overall plans of care is a
game changer. I think this can transform
pediatric health care. "
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CHILDREN'S HOSPITALS TODAY Fall 2023
Children's Hospitals Today - Fall 2023

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