Hospital Admission Process

Currently our nurses complete the same paperwork, perform the same screenings, and do a full admission for every patient regardless of their status: inpatient, observation, ambulatory, or outpatient. This is very standard but not very efficient. Inpatient length of stay averages 5 days, whereas ambulatory and observation are less then 24 hours, while outpatient is typically only a few hours. We are tryng to determine if their is a more efficient way to handle the nurse admission process. For example many of our nurses tell us for non-inpatients they are still performing admission tasks and the patient is ready to go home. Do any hospitals have a better way of handling this?

Hi,

From my understanding on the hospital industry, may be the admission process can be classified as “in-patient”, “out-patient” and “Emergency”.

As “Emergency” is unavoidable situation and the process to be simple and quick, we need a special admission process for the same.

After that to follow, only “Out-patient” admission process with pre-screening techniques to all other “non-emergency” candidates and later if required the same candidate can be transferred to “In-patient” admission process.

May be this method could be efficient from my perspective.

@pkapla: What are some of the techniques/tools that you have currently employed to study your processes? Its seems like you might have some observations, interviews and some level of VOC being captured? After you have some preliminary insight on the processes, the problem areas, you might consider doing a process mapping using business process modeling notation. BPMN is easy to understand for everyone involved: nurses, analysts etc.Once a visual map is established, you can begin to identify commonalities and variances to design a more efficient process. This way any non-value added process is easily identifiable and avoided. For example: for a patient being admitted to ER vs patient being admitted for a pre-scheduled surgery procedure, the non-value added tasks for the nurses can be easily identifiable and eliminated.
Good Luck!