Allscripts

Hospital Patient Flow Solutions

From the moment a patient arrives at the hospital to the point of discharge and beyond, Sunrise Patient Flow™ gives hospitals total management and visibility of patients’ movements throughout the enterprise. Hospital management can easily identify bottlenecks and operational constraints and better coordinate resources to optimize hospital patient flow.

Exclusively endorsed by the American Hospital Association for bed management and patient throughput solutions, Sunrise Patient Flow is an enterprise performance system that addresses each of the critical components of hospital patient flow. The solution provides enterprise-wide transparency and control over the flow process: from a patient’s arrival in the ED or admissions, to patient placement and care delivery throughout hospital departments, to well-coordinated discharge planning and fast bed turnover. Real-time business process management and intelligent performance reporting enable managers to make instant adjustments and decisions to optimize flow and facilitate continuous system improvement.

Increasing accountability through communication and workflow

Sunrise Patient Flow is the only patient flow solution on the market that incorporates real-time electronic communications and automated workflow coupled with clinical and operational visibility in a single system. The solution works seamlessly with the hospital’s admissions/discharge/transfer (ADT) and clinical information solutions, including the Sunrise Clinical Manager™ and other vendors’ enterprise health information systems.

Therefore, each person involved in the hospital patient flow process, from clinicians and bed managers to housekeepers and transport, knows exactly what is happening and what must happen next. The solution helps to expedite administrative and clinical tasks more efficiently and accurately for faster turnaround and more optimized resources.

The Sunrise Patient Flow platform leverages the latest Microsoft .NET, WPF, and SQL Server technologies to facilitate rapid and flexible client deployments as well as significant usability advantages. The patient flow solutions are part of our Sunrise Performance Management™ solution suite.

Solutions for each component of patient flow

With the ability to work with a variety of hospital information system vendors, Sunrise Patient Flow can be delivered as an integrated platform of products, or as individual products addressing specific critical areas. Components include:

Bed Management

Sunrise Bed Management™ combines the processes of patient placement and resource allocation into an automated, Web-enabled bed control and communications command center that is a core component of the Sunrise Patient Flow™ enterprise performance system. The solution gives hospitals a 360-degree view of all stakeholders involved in hospital patient flow, allowing them to optimize patient placement, drive enterprise visibility and increase overall patient and staff satisfaction.

Interoperable with the hospital admissions/discharge/transfer (ADT) system, Sunrise Bed Management intelligently matches patients to beds based on clinical needs and real-time bed availability. The solution helps expedite the patient’s transition from admission to the right room without the time-consuming manual work — phone calls, pages, and impromptu floor meetings — usually needed to find the right bed for each patient.

Staff gains a mobile, interactive view of supply and demand across the enterprise, and can see pending admissions, transfers, discharges and bed supply in real time. Automated task lists more efficiently manage workflow and deliver instant messages by pager, phone or PDA to alert managers of to-dos and escalations. With a full view of all activities, hospitals can better coordinate care across roles and departments for smoother hospital patient flow and better patient care outcomes. Key capabilities include:

Inter and Intra-departmental workflow management
Enterprise visibility and patient care management
Automated and instantaneous communications
Integrated performance reporting

The intelligence and automation to keep things moving

Sunrise Bed Management features sophisticated, integrated communications and workflow to orchestrate the complex, multi-departmental activities that contribute to coordinated bed supply and patient flow. Features include:

Flexible, configurable workflow and views to reflect organizational processes
Electronic capture of admission requests and clinical data
Multi-user work lists consolidated with demand management functions
Seamless process of direct admissions, in advance of ADT activities
Intelligent clinical based matching of patient needs to optimal beds
Mini “patient needs” record with real-time clinical and process-related data
Interactive, online bedboard and customized views by department
Real-time status updates, supply/demand metrics and key performance indicator (KPI) healthcare dashboard
Automated mobile device alerts and instantaneous escalations for unfulfilled tasks
Custom reports for nurses, admissions, bed managers and executives

Bed Turnover

When the patient flow process stalls, scrutiny often falls on the Environment Services (EVS) department responsible for cleaning and preparing beds for new patients. More than just traditional bed tracking, Sunrise Bed Turnover™, a core component of the Sunrise Patient Flow™ enterprise performance system, provides EVS managers with real-time automated bed tracking, workflow and job routing to keep things moving without micromanagement of staff and processes. EVS departments can elevate their performance and contribute positively to a hospital's drive for higher patient throughput through improved hospital patient flow.

As soon as a bed is vacated, the Web-based Sunrise Bed Turnover system dispatches an electronic cleaning request. Then the system intelligently load-balances work depending on staff availability and location, and uses automated pager alerts and multilingual, interactive voice response (IVR) technology to allocate tasks to the appropriate team members. EVS managers can monitor bed status and turnover activity in real time, and can track staff productivity using comprehensive embedded reporting.

Sunrise Bed Turnover enables enterprise visibility, automated instantaneous communications and inter- and intra-department workflows and patient care management, which drives coordinated clinical workflow and improved resource utilization.

High accountability for unparalleled efficiency

With Sunrise Bed Turnover, EVS departments deliver higher service levels and save money by more efficiently managing their work queue and dramatically reducing the need for extra staff and overtime to work through the backlog of dirty beds. Sunrise Bed Turnover includes:

Patent-pending workflow and job-routing, including intelligent auto-dispatch and load-balancing, customized according to a hospital's processes
Real-time status displays of bed turnover activity, in both summary and detail
Complete staff activity tracking and on-demand re-allocation of work assignments
Automated pager alerts and intelligent escalations based on task
Intuitive, multilingual interactive voice response (IVR) technology for job status updates
Comprehensive productivity reporting

Care Visibility

Designed by nurses and clinicians, Sunrise Care Visibility™ brings occupancy, bed status, and patient location information together with real-time clinical information to create a visual communications system that drives better-coordinated care and operational efficiency for improved hospital patient flow and patient care outcomes. The Web-based solution is an integral part of the Sunrise Patient Flow™ enterprise performance system and works directly with a hospital's clinical information solution, including Sunrise Clinical Manager™ and other vendors' enterprise health information systems.

A graphical visibility healthcare dashboard provides nurses, clinicians and other staff with at-a-glance information about an individual patient or an entire floor or unit. Staff can more effectively prioritize work and manage care with minimal phone calls and manual information gathering. When integrated with technologies such as radio frequency identification (RFID), Sunrise Care Visibility provides detailed, minute-by-minute views of patient status and resource allocation, customizable by department or role.

Sunrise Patient Flow enables enterprise visibility, automated instantaneous communications and inter/intra department workflows and patient care management which drives coordinated clinical workflow and improves resource utilization.

Greater visibility for higher levels of care

Sunrise Care Visibility enables nurses and clinicians to more proactively assign resources. The system keep tabs on clinical and operational needs, restoring hours spent making phone calls and chasing information so clinicians have more time to spend on patient care. The solution includes:

Real-time capacity and staffing metrics
Real-time bed activity, patient activity, and clinical update status
Real-time staff and resource location tracking through RFID enablement
Interactive, customized unit views by department, resource or service
Automated pager and PDA alerts with clinical details
Intelligent escalation when events are not addressed

Transport

Sunrise Transport™, an integral piece of the Sunrise Patient Flow™ enterprise performance system, provides transport managers with real-time visibility and automated management of complex patient and material transport processes.

Patient transport in hospitals is fraught with opportunities for bottlenecks — administrative delays, breakdowns in communication, and unavailable staff and equipment. A study published in Nursing Economics documented that 87.6% of time in the patient transport process is inefficient time, marked by lost productivity and ineffective activities*.

With the Web-based Sunrise Transport, transport departments can dramatically increase response and job completion time and more efficiently manage resources to ensure the staff and materials are in place when they're needed.

Working seamlessly with the hospital's admissions/discharge/transfer (ADT) system — including Sunrise Enterprise Registration and other vendors' ADT solutions — Sunrise Transport leverages existing telephony and paging infrastructure and can automatically schedule advanced jobs based on pending patient needs. Intuitive graphical tracking displays and intelligent work queues enable the automated capture and assignment of transport jobs and detailed management of activities.
Sunrise Transport enables automated workflow, enterprise visibility, business process management, instantaneous intelligent communications and integrated performance reporting which drives coordinated hospital patient flow and improves resource utilization.

Drive patient throughput and increase satisfaction

More efficient management of transport services means a dramatic reduction in wait time for clinicians and patients, leading to higher satisfaction and more effective clinical performance. Sunrise Transport streamlines your transport processes with:

Real-time electronic capture of scheduled and on-demand transport requests
Consolidated, multi-user work queues and dispatch management
Real-time job status updates, both centralized and decentralized
Real-time status of transportation activity at summary and detail levels
Intelligent auto-dispatch, conflict-checking, and load-balancing of work across regions, configurable based on hospital processes
Complete staff activity tracking and on-demand staff re-allocation
Automated page alerts and electronic job assignments
Intuitive, multilingual IVR for job status updates
Intelligent escalations
Real-time activity tracking and event capture
Comprehensive productivity reporting, trending and variance analysis

Performance Reporting

Hospital patient flow can change minute-to-minute. At the same time, the ability for hospital executives and department managers to gain full visibility into and control over the process is mission-critical for decision-making that affects both short-term and long-term outcomes.

Sunrise Performance Reporting™, an integral part of the Sunrise Patient Flow™ enterprise performance system, provides hospital management with powerful reporting and analytics displayed as intuitive, detailed visual healthcare dashboards. Drawing from rich data and delivering customizable report types, Sunrise Performance Reporting informs both on-the-spot decision-making and real-time activity monitoring, as well as trend analysis and strategic planning.

Sunrise Performance Reporting enables key reporting capabilities that promote enterprise visibility and real-time business intelligence to drive, evaluate and promote healthcare performance management.

Assessing patient flow from the 3-foot and 30,000-foot levels

With Sunrise Performance Reporting, hospital executives, managers and clinicians always have the information they need to assess how hospital patient flow is impacting key metrics and care quality, hospital financials and organizational productivity. The solution includes:

Predictive and retrospective occupancy and capacity reporting
Admissions and bed management reporting
Census, length of stay (LOS), and closed beds analysis
Pending and actual transfer and discharge analysis
Productivity analysis for support services and transportation activities

Patient Flow Consulting

Hospitals depend on the Sunrise Patient Flow™ enterprise performance system to automate the activities and processes that drive optimal bed management, care coordination and patient throughput. However, sometimes the processes themselves require careful analysis and optimization based on best practices to truly make a difference in enterprise-wide efficiency and hospital patient flow.

Sunrise Patient Flow Consulting Services enables hospitals to optimize their investment in patient flow solutions and further drive overall performance, process and resource utilization. We draw on the expertise of a team of clinical professionals — former bed managers, ER nurses and patient placement coordinators — who are experienced at analyzing and improving hospital patient flow. Sunrise Patient Flow Consulting Services includes:

Performance check-up: Get a snapshot of how your technology, financials and organizational culture impact your hospital patient flow.
Process optimization: Make improvements that last, and that get the highest, most sustainable ROI possible.
Post-optimization check-up: Gain input on how to facilitate continuous improvements into the future.

Whether an organization is in a rural or metropolitan area, or is a specialty, community, or multi-site provider, Sunrise Patient Flow provides clinically focused solutions to reduce bed turnover time, length of stay and patient wait times. The system also increases admissions and overall hospital capacity, and improves emergency readiness capabilities, productivity and the bottom line.