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The Health Care Innovations Exchange is an AHRQ program designed to support health care professionals in sharing and adopting innovations that improve the delivery of care to patients. Explore this site to find innovative strategies and quality-related tools, learn how to improve your organization's ability to innovate and adopt new ideas, and interact with innovators and adopters.
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Find Innovations and QualityTools classified by disease or clinical category, patient population, stage of care, setting of care, and more.
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May 12, 2008 (Missed an issue of What's New? Visit the Archive.)
In this issue, we feature Innovations and QualityTools that address patient flow management. Improving patient flow in hospitals increases patient safety, access to care, patient and staff satisfaction, and revenue.
Overcrowding in hospitals can lead to bottlenecks in patient flow, delays in care, lack of continuity in care, and other inefficiencies.
The featured innovations describe how three hospitals used strategies and flow management principles from the private sector to redesign their health care processes.
Borrowing from other industries, a large hospital implemented principles of "flow management" to redesign the flow of operations in its surgical department, leading to enhanced quality of care, improved patient and provider satisfaction, and reductions in the frequency of delayed and canceled surgeries.
A hospital’s obstetrics and gynecology residency training clinic used Six Sigma methodologies to identify and address inefficiencies in workflow.
Dupont Hospital introduced the principles of the Lean production model to its surgery department, leading to a more than doubling of the percentage of on-time surgery starts, from 27 to 55 percent.
The featured QualityTools, which were funded by the Institute for Healthcare Improvement, are designed to improve patient flow processes by analyzing patient wait and transfer times, and by providing a structure to report daily changes in patient surgeries and procedures.
Go to this issue's QualityTools.|
Go to all QualityTools by posted date.
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Last updated: May 12, 2008.
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