Editor's Corner

How smoothly does your emergency department move patients from entry to in-patient bed? Not smoothly enough, if a recent vendor survey is any indication. While the problem isn't discussed in the trade media and blogosphere as much as other hot healthcare industry topics like pay for performance, RHIOS and EMR adoption, clearly, patient flow is an issue that should probably be talked about more often.

The survey, by workflow automation vendor TeleTracking and the American College of Emergency Physicians, asked hospital executives how they felt about the state of patient flow through their ED. The responses suggested that crowding due to queuing up of patients is a very significant issue. In fact, 65 percent of healthcare executives surveyed said that patient flow is an "extremely serious" problem, and roughly half said that it was among their top three management concerns.

While overcrowding hasn't exactly killed the ED admission process, a substantial minority of respondents (23 percent) reported having had to divert patients away from their ED 20 times or more during the last year alone. Most would prefer that patients who need a bed get into it within two hours, but almost a third (27 percent) said that patients wait four hours or more in the ED, taking up exam room space and nursing time, at minimum.

As a vendor, of course, TeleTracking wants you to think about the ways in which automation can help solve the problem. Execs agree to a point, but three-quarters note that it will take staff and process changes to improve ED patient flow even with great IT tools in place. As readers know, IT tools are only as good as the people who use them, so this makes perfect sense.

Still, the bottom line is if you're in health IT, finding ways to help get your ED out from under the patient burden will probably be on the agenda soon--so be prepared. - Anne

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