Improving Patient Flow at a Healthcare Facility

The 10 Strategic Points

Broad Topic Area

1 Broad Topic Area/Title of Project: Improving patient flow at a healthcare facility to match the national yardstick of urgent care visit periods lasting no more than 60 minutes

Literature Review

2 Literature Review:
* Background of the Problem/Gap:
Despite delays in care delivery being very common in both private and public health care systems, accurate data on the problem's prevalence, severity, or kind is lacking. It is not always clear when a wait for an appointment with a particular health care provider is reasonable (McGlynn, 2020).
Long wait times are caused by a mismatch between the numbers of patients on the queue waiting to see the physicians and the number of available caregivers, the availability of care facilities, and alternative strategies for the provision of care to the patients at any given time (McGlynn, 2020). Inefficiencies in operations, poor coordination of care, and a poor organizational culture within healthcare facilities are some of the causes of long wait times, which end up disrupting the flow of services, underutilization of the available resources, and the lack of the identified balance (Jaffe et al, 2020). Organizational elements such as the organizational culture and the current leadership can also worsen access concerns and elongate the patient waiting time before a patient sees a physician. The complexities and procedural interdependencies of the American healthcare system may make balancing supply and demand more difficult.
The most looked into concept when organizing schedules is keeping an eye on the supply and demand balance. Unfortunately, most clinical settings lack the analytical capacity to notice and comprehend the dynamics at hand, nor do they take a considerably broad view of the multiple options essential in stepping up supply or decreasing demand (Page et al., 2017; Drews et al, 2019). Demand is generally defined as the total number of patients being scheduled for appointments during a specific time, such as one day, combined with the total number of walk-in patients and follow-up appointments. The demand is usually generated by physicians at a specific care facility. The majority of institutions, on the other hand, define their supply entirely as a sum of the total available spaces they need to be occupied on a given day or specified period. That is to say, solely with regard to of clinician availability during that time period. It is uncommon for a healthcare facility to keep track of incoming calls, patient bookings, waiting periods, walk-in patients, and no-shows. Most facilities also rarely keep records of the number of inquiries that other physicians may manage to handle, telephone-based assistance requests, or other electronic-based consultations.
Emergency Care Delays
Overcrowding, care delays for patients, long wait times in various areas within the healthcare facilities, and resource constraints are all too frequent in today's emergency rooms (Sun et al., 2019). Relatively long wait times and stay durations are likely to increase the number of patients who walk out of the emergency departments without getting the chance of being attended to by the physicians, in addition to contributing ...