Hartford Hospital Boosts Early Discharge Rate With Business Intelligence Solution From Carefx

MELBOURNE, Fla. and SCOTTSDALE, Ariz., April 21, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- Hartford Hospital, an 867-bed regional teaching hospital and referral center in Connecticut, has increased its early discharge rate, a metric hospitals use to manage bed utilization, nearly three-fold by offering its clinicians access to a business intelligence (BI) dashboard from Carefx, a leading provider of interoperable workflow solutions.

"As part of our multidisciplinary program to improve performance and quality, our clinicians rely on Carefx's Patient Throughput Dashboard to pinpoint patient flow trends and opportunities, which has enabled the hospital to accelerate appropriate discharge and cut length of stay," said Michael C. Lindberg, M.D., chairman, Department of Medicine, Hartford Hospital.  "Instead of having to contend with multiple data sources, access delays, and dull, text-based presentations, clinicians use the dashboard to view and act upon near real-time patient flow data in a lively, intuitive, graphical format."  

Originally developed by Cleveland Clinic, and now licensed and deployed by Carefx, the Patient Throughput Dashboard is one of Carefx' Business Intelligence Solutions.  Other dashboards include those for physician scorecards, mortality, core measures, patient experience, clinician performance on Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) indicators, length-of-stay, and readmission rates.

The Patient Throughput Dashboard presents a healthcare organization's own aggregated data, allowing clinicians and executives to quickly identify improvement opportunities, eliminate operational bottlenecks, improve bed utilization and control length of stay.

"The Carefx Patient Throughput Dashboard helps hospitals manage daily census, lower cost-per-case, improve patient satisfaction, and minimize operational inefficiencies," said Andrew Hurd, CEO, Carefx. "These dashboards will help providers respond to reimbursement challenges, marketplace shifts, and financial constraints."

Hartford Hospital uses a weekly feed to pull inpatient and emergency department (ED) data from billing, bed management, and transport systems into its Patient Throughput Dashboard.  Clinicians and executives then use the data to hone in on patient flow obstacles and identify best practices for training and coaching lower-performing individuals, units and floors.

After only nine months of using the new dashboard, users were surveyed and:

• 70 percent reported they were actively using dashboards (weekly)
• 90 percent claimed improved ability to manage workflow
• 100 percent claimed dashboard saved them time on data gathering, report generation

"The Patient Throughput Dashboard allows us to identify and diagnose problem areas and floors so we can invest resources to enhance patient flow," adds Jamie Roche, M.D., vice president, Patient Safety & Quality, Hartford Hospital, and one of the executive sponsors of the project.  "The dashboard's real-time metrics help us to comply with Ongoing Professional Practice Evaluation (OPPE) standards, offer physicians immediate feedback on length of stay, readmissions and order entry, and provide the Joint Commission with precise, accurate feedback on progress."  

The Patient Throughput Dashboard also tracks the hospital's progress on early discharge goals, triggering conversations among clinicians, managers and executives about how the hospital can increase early discharge through activities such as early tray delivery or movement of patients from the ED to less-critical care floors.  

For more information on Carefx Business Intelligence Solutions, visit http://www.carefx.com/products/performance-management

About Hartford Hospital

Hartford Hospital is an 867-bed regional referral center that provides high-quality care in all clinical disciplines. Among its divisions is The Institute of Living, a 114-bed mental health facility with a national and international reputation of excellence. Jefferson House, a 104-bed long-term care facility, is also a special division of Hartford Hospital. The Hospital major centers of clinical excellence include cardiology, oncology, emergency services and trauma, mental health, women's health, orthopedics, bloodless surgery and advanced organ transplantation. Hartford Hospital owns and operates the state's only air ambulance system, LIFE STAR.

About Carefx

Carefx, a subsidiary of Harris Corporation, supports healthcare organizations in achieving their vision of advancing the quality and safety of patient care delivery through its Fusionfx suite of interoperable workflow and analytics solutions. Fusionfx streamlines and simplifies clinical and business workflow and connects care providers to the information they need - where, when, and how they need it. By managing care transitions and information gaps between diverse systems, departments and facilities, Fusionfx delivers crucial patient information with speed, efficiency and logic. Carefx supports more than 800 hospitals, health systems, and health information exchanges (HIEs) across North America, Europe and Asia. For more information on Carefx, visit www.carefx.com.  Contact Carefx at (480) 833-5010 or by email as [email protected].

About Harris Corporation

Harris is an international communications and information technology company serving government and commercial markets in more than 150 countries. Headquartered in Melbourne, Florida, the company has approximately $6 billion of annual revenue and more than 16,000 employees — including nearly 7,000 engineers and scientists. Harris is dedicated to developing best-in-class assured communications® products, systems, and services. Additional information about Harris Corporation is available at www.harris.com.

SOURCE Carefx