Hospitals in pursuit of excellence

Safe and Timely: Patient Transitions from Emergency Department to Inpatient Unit

North Shore Medical Center is dedicated to safely transitioning all emergency department patients who require an inpatient stay into a bed within 90 minutes. Over the past year, a multidisciplinary team has focused on this goal by using Toyota Production System methods, including waste reduction, direct observations and PDSA. Through a series of multi-day improvement events driven by frontline staff, the hospital was able to improve process measures (i.e., moving hospitalist workflow out of the ED) as well as outcome measures (i.e., the median number of minutes a patient waits for transition).