"Optimizing patient flow impacts patient safety and the quality of care, and it has financial implications for health care institutions. Yet the story hasn't changed much in the decades that patient flow has been a focus of health care administrators. Hospitals are straining to meet demand. Surgeries continue to be delayed. Ambulances are diverted. Emergency departments are overcrowded while waiting for inpatient beds. Staffing shortages and economic challenges only serve to exacerbate the inefficiencies of patient flow. Perhaps this approach to managing patient flow is not the best one. Crowded emergency departments and empty operating rooms are indicative of the variability in patient flow throughout the hospital, including emergency rooms and ICUs, as well as the flow to other settings of care, such as home care. Our second title edited by patient flow expert Dr. Eugene Litvak, Optimizing Patient Flow: Advanced Strategies for Managing Variability to Enhance Access, Quality, and Safety, offers readers innovative techniques for optimizing patient flow and improving operations management while providing clear examples of successful implementation. It can help you optimize patient flow in your own organization"--Publisher's description

Part I: CEO perspectives: committing to optimized patient flow. How we improved care and added millions to the bottom line: an outsider's perspectives -- Using operations management to reduce variability in surgical demand -- A proactive initiative to improve or scheduling -- Using science and design to improve patient flow -- Part II: The mechanics of flow. Reduction and management of variability in health care delivery -- Using variability methodology to improve patient flow: three projects offering tangible results -- Variability methodology: tools & techniques -- Part III: How we did it: the case studies. Right focus, right solution: how reducing variability in admission and discharge improves hospital capacity and flow -- New Jersey's collaborative on patient throughput -- Rightsizing inpatient medical units: developing telemetry ADT criteria -- Standardizing admission, transfer, and discharge processes to reduce artificial and clinical variability -- Part IV: Whole system flow: beyond the hospital setting. Bottlenecks in flow to post-acute care -- Pulling out all the stops: delivering whole system flow.