The Earlier, the Better
“It’s harder than you think,” Dr. O’Boyle admits. “There are always extraneous factors that can delay the hospitalists from getting [discharges] done.”
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Bed Management
Early-day discharge is just one pathway to improve “patient flow” and, therefore, bed management, according to a recent editorial in Health Affairs jointly penned by executives from the Institute for Healthcare Optimization in Newton, Mass., and the Institute for Healthcare Improvement in Cambridge, Mass.1
Other techniques are:
- Reducing length of stay (LOS): Hospitalists have long focused on keeping patient stays at a minimum, although many researchers have argued that LOS can only be reduced to a point. Quality and patient safety issues in the Affordable Care Act might actually increase LOS, as hospitalists and other physicians work to reduce 30-day readmissions by ensuring everything is done right the first time.
- Expanding capacity: At an estimated cost of $1 million to add one new bed to a hospital, it is simply unlikely that institutions will be in a fiscal position to add physical beds in the next few years.
- Increasing staff: “Here again,” the authors state flatly, “pressures on hospital systems and operating margins make it unlikely that hospitals will dramatically increase their payrolls.”
No Consensus
Although a variety of techniques can help improve early day discharge, all have hurdles. Two of the most common suggestions are geographic rounding and discharge lounges. A third is the active bed-management (ABM) model that hospitalist Eric Howell, MD, SFHM, associate professor of medicine at Johns Hopkins University and director of Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center’s HM division, wrote about in the Annals of Internal Medicine in December 2008.2
Geographic rounding, also dubbed unit-based setups, can help improve bed management because all participants are co-located; however, the gains likely are not enough to motivate an institution to implement the model without demonstrated improvements to other systems as well, says John Nelson, MD, FACP, MHM, cofounder and past president of SHM and a principal in the practice management firm Nelson Flores Hospital Medicine Consultants.
Discharge lounges—areas usually administered by a nurse and billed as a place for patients to gather after they’ve been formally discharged but before they have arranged a ride to physically leave the hospital—have been adopted by many hospitals. Dr. Simone and others question the liability issues associated with keeping discharged patients under the watch of hospital staff and also wonder whether the setup can have a negative impact on patient satisfaction. (For more on discharge lounges, check out “Solution of Problem,” at www.the-hospitalist.org.)
—David Bachman, MD, senior medical director for transitions of care, MaineHealth Clinical Integration, Portland, Maine
David Bachman, MD, senior medical director for transitions of care at MaineHealth Clinical Integration in Portland, Maine, and a former hospital administrator in New England, sees hospitalists as a lynchpin to the discharge process, but he also urges them to get the hospital to see them as “change agents” who need institutional support to make significant improvements.
“You’re trying to run cases through and it’s all dependent on downstream activity,” Dr. Bachman says. “If the hospitalist can push back and get this recognized as a hospital issue, that’s the only time when this problem can be solved. Hospitalists are a piece of the puzzle, but it’s not just them.”
Ideas to Chew On
Mitchell Wilson, MD, SFHM, chief medical officer for Eagle Hospital Physicians in Atlanta, agrees that reprioritizing physician rounds to encourage discharges would push patients out earlier, but he wants to see more physician assistants and nurse practitioners (PAs and NPs) blended into those rounds. The partnership would be a relatively simple and direct way for physicians to pass off nonclinical or less-intensive duties that afford them more time to focus on discharge planning. A dedicated nurse for HM service and the use of telemedicine could be folded into HM practices to help.
