Innovation At The Speed of Thought
L
ast week, Michael discussed some of our offerings with a customer and was able to coordinate a meeting for us to present to them not just what we have done already, but some further ideas of what we can do moving forward.
When we encounter opportunities like this one, we really take them seriously and we like to go above and beyond any possible expectations that the customer may have.
This lead to a team meeting (BTW, as it is, we try our darndest to meet every day anyway) to address this particular opportunity with this customer. One of the things we identified was the potential to look into how to better communicate the processes that a patient goes through in the Emergency Department (ED).
A typical patient goes through six steps while in the ED:
- Arrival
- Registry
- Triage
- MD Visit
- Test and Treatments
- Outcome
Most EDs can track the time a patient spends in each step, but what they can’t do is alert the appropriate people when acceptable times are being exceeded. For example, if the patient has been appropriately registered, but the Triage process hasn’t been started for 15 minutes, then it is likely that patient will start feeling like he/she is not receiving the service they expect. Of course, some patients require more immediate service than others, but 15 minutes is likely a limit of how long a patient is willing to wait before complaining.
As I mentioned, most EDs have access to this “clock”, but they don’t have access in a way that it can help them while situations are ongoing. That is to say, most EDs either have a dashboard or some sort of reporting system that shows them how the clock is running, but what they don’t have is a proactive notification system that alerts them when these thresholds are being reached.
We know we can create a more interesting dashboard as well as use our vaunted notifications system to help address this situation. And so we did. As you can see in the mockup screens below, we created a monitoring system that identifies yellow and red alerts as well as abandonment situations.
Of course, this system is updated real-time, but more importantly as soon as the yellow cautions are triggered, notifications will be issued and if we reach red alert status, more escalated notifications will be sent out.
This helps the ED staff better server their patients and prevents both complaints and abandonment.
