The Problem
Excess days in the hospital are multi-factorial. One factor affecting the length of stay is care team design. In 2021, the combinations of physicians, case managers, physical therapists, occupational therapists, and nurses were formed by chance. The assignment of care members to teams that worked optimally together was rarely considered when these teams were established. There were also too many distinct team members that each staff member had to work for to care for their group of patients. Consequently, care communication and handoffs suffered. Inefficiency lengthened patients’ stay in the hospital and decreased staff satisfaction.
To improve care coordination at Duke Raleigh, Hospital Medicine leaders (including lean transformation coaches) structured patient care teams and created a manual Microsoft Excel process supporting documentation of recent care teams, information about incoming faculty/staff, and formatting to support staff-to-patient and staff-to-team matching. While this advanced spreadsheet improved care coordination, aligning these departments’ patient care assignments remained a complex puzzle that required significant manual effort, especially to create it for new units and scale across the health system. They sought a more streamlined approach through automation.
Our Solution
The minimum viable solution was to enhance the 2022 Excel-based Scheduling Assistant Tool to reduce the time required for data entry and validation and reduce errors.
Anticipated Impact
This solution will decrease number of distinct team members that each staff member needs to work with to care for their own panel of patient. This will improve communication between team members that ultimately results in more efficient and satisfying work. In other words, lower length of stay and higher staff joy at work.
