Jean Halpin, chief operating officer at Grant Medical Center, said nurses feel “empowered” with the integrated patient discharge analytics technology, which leverages artificial intelligence to analyze administrative tasks such as discharge coordination, test orders and prescriptions.
It’s been proven recently that many nurses don’t trust AI. But at the Central Ohio-based health system, nurses are embracing discharge automation—largely because of the efficiency in discharge planning, reduced manual workload, and better in-rounds experience that the technology brings, according to Halpin.
Mudit Garg, CEO of Qventus, which developed the software, said health systems not only increase access to care but also save money by analyzing gaps in care plans, quickly ordering and managing milestones they need to achieve by narrowing the discharge process and expanding bed capacity.
Garg said OhioHealth expects to care for an additional 3,500 patients in the first year using the early discharge planning and prioritization capabilities in its electronic health record process.
“The result was a significant impact on both cost savings and operational improvements for OhioHealth,” he explained — the equivalent of about $500,000.
In a joint interview with Healthcare IT News, Halpin and Garg described key factors leading to improved patient experience and operational efficiency through AI-driven inpatient coordination technology.
Q. Does OhioHealth’s staff performance and overall quality of care delivery help address burnout and workforce shortages?
Halpin: Absolutely. The administrative burden reduces the face-to-face time that healthcare teams have with patients, which is crucial to establishing positive relationships between nurses, doctors and patients.
AI tools have empowered our staff to work at the highest level of their license, rather than spending so much of their day completing paperwork and searching for answers in research. Our staff can not only see more patients, but also provide better care, by taking on extra time that they would not have otherwise had.
I think we’re seeing a lot of our employees being energized by this technology.
Q. Do nurses use early discharge planning tools?
Halpin: Yes, our nurses are fully embracing the AI tools we put in place to better assist them in their daily administrative work.
Many of them feel exhausted and burdened with coordinating patient discharges. With seamless integration into the EHR, our nursing team feels empowered to prioritize clinical interactions and patient care, while Qventus can handle the more time-consuming administrative requirements.
Q. What factors in care coordination or other operational or clinical aspects have been shown to reduce length of stay?
Halpin: The key factor is to determine the gap in patient flow.
By analyzing our data, Qventus was able to identify areas for improvement in our day-to-day operations. Tasks like coordinating discharges to rehab facilities, ordering tests, prescribing medications, and more take up a lot of our healthcare team’s time, and Qventus has alleviated much of that administrative burden.
For example, if there are delays in coordinating discharges, this can unnecessarily prolong a patient’s stay, which is an industry-wide problem. By addressing all of these gaps in patient flow, we can speed up care, get patients in earlier to be evaluated, and discharge them when they are ready to go home; accounting for nearly 1,400 days of excess patient stay reduction.
Garg: By embedding EDP Intelligence insights and flow prioritization capabilities into OhioHealth’s existing EHR workflows, we predicted discharge dates and patient status, allowing their care team to review and adjust based on their clinical expertise and reduce overall manual tasks.
Integration into the EHR helps streamline workflows, reduce the cognitive burden on the healthcare team, and improve care efficiency.
There are hundreds of different tests and procedures that must be performed in a timely manner to allow for timely discharge of a patient. For example, assessing whether a patient is ready to go home or to a skilled nursing facility may require coverage by the payer and coordination between the family and the facility.
The technology predicts the patient’s likely discharge date, where they might go after discharge on day one, and then continually adjusts to the patient’s clinical condition as it progresses. The clinical team reviews the recommendations [in making care decisions].
Q. How has increasing inpatient bed capacity improved access to care?
Halpin: We’ve all seen long wait times at emergency rooms, but when you look closer, much of that wait time is simply due to the lengthy discharge process.
While you wait in the emergency room for a bed to become available, emergency room patients waiting for long-term care are delayed because a patient on the floor above was not discharged in time.
By optimizing patient flow through the use of AI, we speed up coordination and better predict patient discharge dates, reducing delays in care for patients waiting to be seen or admitted to the emergency department.
Garg: Optimizing discharge planning and shortening length of stay has helped to quickly allocate hospital beds for hospitalized patients.
This improved turnaround rate means OhioHealth can admit and treat more patients in need without needing additional hospital beds. In addition to treating thousands of additional patients, the tool will also save patients 400,000 hours of hospital stay.
Increasing bed capacity also reduces overcrowding in emergency departments, relieves pressure on medical staff and improves resource allocation.
Q. How is improvement in care coordination measured? Why is it important?
Halpin: For us, improving care coordination means spending more time with patients and less time searching for answers on screens, which is critical when it comes to the patient experience at OhioHealth.
The longer a patient has to wait in the emergency room, the worse their experience will be.
By speeding up care by safely reducing barriers in our patient flow, we are seeing more patients, which is one way we are measuring improvement. Some of our teams most impacted at Grant Medical Center, for example, are the physical therapy, imaging, and laboratory teams, who can refer to recommendations in patient charts to determine which patients can be prioritized for testing and which patients are ready to go home and return as outpatients.
Garg: We measure success through key performance indicators such as reduced length of stay/excess days, reduced readmission rates, improved patient flow, and timely discharge planning. Improved patient satisfaction scores and reduced manual workload for healthcare staff are also essential metrics.
AI provides real-time insights and predictive analytics to OhioHealth, enabling continuous optimization as Qventus learns by increasingly integrating deeper into the OhioHealth health system.
The impact of improved care coordination is profound – it improves patient outcomes by ensuring timely, appropriate care and minimizing delays, providing a seamless experience from admission to discharge.
Q. What feedback can OhioHealth share about the 60% rounding time savings for staff?
Halpin: A large part of our staff’s rounding time involves discussing the patient’s expected discharge date and next steps for care, which change daily depending on progress. This discussion includes reviewing patient data and referring to research to make a shared decision between nursing staff, physicians, and support teams, such as physical therapy, labs, imaging, and more.
To speed up this process, the technology uses data collected from each patient’s electronic health record (EHR) to suggest next steps and coordinate discharge by comparing similar cases and other studies.
In doing so, our healthcare team can quickly reference the recommendations during each patient visit – and determine whether they agree, eliminating a lot of manual effort when reviewing charts and labs, saving our team valuable time and allowing them to get back to patient care.
Andrea Fox is senior editor of Healthcare IT News.
Email: [email protected]
Healthcare IT News is a publication of HIMSS Media.
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