Cost of a slow discharge process

Yes – because our hospital typically runs at capacity for acute care beds, we were able to easily equate the prolonged discharge process to lost revenue opportunity. 

I did a six sigma project on a discharge process and we easily calculated the cost/benefit by looking at increased LOS and cost per patient day. Also, lost revenue opportunities by patients going elsewhere when being directly admitted. For ED patients waiting for a bed we calculated increased time in the ED and lost revenue for eloped patients. Discharging processes are the most important in a hospital to address if the facility is looking to streamline patient throughput. No one moves until the discharged patient leaves.

sixsigmadeewana:
We also do the same measurements as mentioned by ch3 and hung lee.  Your resource management group or finance should be able to provide you with a length of stay analysis that shows the impact of additional fractional days in terms of dollars.  You should be able to determine an average revenue (be conservative since finance usually likes that) and use that as a measure for LWBS.  You can also find out the cost per day (provided by the LOS analysis) and use that to determine how much you actually lose when a patient stays longer than expected.