How To Streamline Patient Transfers with PerfectServe as the Communication Backbone

Advocate Aurora Health is one of the 10 largest not-for-profit, integrated health systems in the United States. A national leader in clinical innovation, health outcomes, consumer experience, and value-based care, the system serves nearly three million patients annually across 27 hospitals, five Level I trauma centers, and 500 sites of care throughout Illinois and Wisconsin.

Challenges

In 2016, leadership at Advocate Aurora Health sought to overcome growing capacity challenges, which were causing care transition delays and volume restraints. To ensure the safe, timely placement of patients within the system and reduce the potential for outmigration, Advocate Aurora sought to alleviate patient placement gaps and prevent delays across care settings.

Advocate Aurora Health needed to standardize patient access workflows across the enterprise to bring continuity to the admissions process and remove silos for all facilities. A program was needed to improve the efficiency and transparency of patient flow, protect revenue, enhance patient safety, and increase patient satisfaction.

Solution

Advocate Aurora Health implemented PerfectServe’s Clinical Collaboration solution systemwide, and it further serves as one of the communication platforms for the Patient Command Center (PCC), a centralized hub that fosters the safe management and timely placement of patients across 3,500 total beds. Launched in March of 2019, the PCC handles over 1,000 patient transfers and admissions per month, ensuring every patient is in the right bed at the right time to get the best care.

Implementation

Advocate Aurora Health partnered with PerfectServe to address the nuances of managing and updating each physician’s schedule, then consolidated schedules and created an escalation plan to reinforce accountability. Escalation pathways and algorithms were standardized and automated within the system.

Communication workflows were optimized using Dynamic Intelligent Routing®, PerfectServe’s proprietary rules-based technology that ensures each message reaches the right clinician at the right time. One standardized dashboard for analytics and reports was created to best understand communication response times, evaluate escalations, and support quality improvement efforts.

Advocate Aurora Health’s leadership promoted the PCC internally by developing multidisciplinary teams including physician, nursing, ED, transportation, and care management representatives. They also held PCC open houses, private tours, and scheduled visits to build trust between clinicians and command center staff.

Results

The Patient Command Center’s multi-pronged approach, with PerfectServe’s Clinical Collaboration solution as a core component, has achieved the following since launch:

• 109 high-level patient transfers have been prevented from leaving to seek care at competing facilities.
• 7 of 10 sites saw a decrease in patient flow times within the first two months.
• 29% decrease in average “Ready to Move to Assigned Bed” time (from 68 to 48 minutes).
• 89.8% direct admission rate for placement, with 10.1% redirected to the ED for immediate care.
• 164 additional patients placed per month, on average.

Conclusion

The Advocate Aurora Health Patient Command Center (PCC) improved the patient experience to prevent patient leakage, strengthen outcomes, and protect revenue. The program improved patient care by standardizing patient access workflows, bridging communication silos across facilities, facilitating clinical collaboration on one central platform, and implementing a failsafe technical infrastructure to support patient placement.

PerfectServe played a critical role in supporting the PCC’s success by ensuring that the correct on-call physician would be reached the first time every time, with automatic message escalation when appropriate. Unifying and standardizing communication across facilities empowered Advocate Aurora’s leadership to monitor accountability and move the needle on patient access.