How a Care Coordination Center Can Improve Care Inefficiencies

Memorial Healthcare System's new $1.7 million center aims to eliminate gaps in patient navigation and care management.

The new Care Coordination Center at Memorial Healthcare System is expected to boost care quality and patient safety, the CMO of the health system says.

The South Florida health system invested about $1.7 million in the 3,000 square foot facility and equipment. The annual cost of operating the center is estimated at $3.7 million.

The Care Coordination Center has five primary capabilities, according to Aharon Sareli, MD, executive vice president and CMO at Memorial Healthcare System.

• The facility will act as a transfer center, with access to real-time data across the health system's six acute-care hospitals. A team including nurses stationed at the center will be able to coordinate patient transfers both within the health system and from other facilities into the system.
   
• Working through the Epic EHR platform, staff at the center can centralize bed placement. Staff at the center can also balance and manage capacity within each of the six hospitals and ensure that patients transferred into the health system are placed in the appropriate care setting.
   
• Staff members at the facility will conduct virtual patient observation. The primary responsibility of virtual patient observers is to keep an eye on inpatients who are at risk of falls.
   
• The facility will serve as a hub for virtual nursing. Through two-way communication tools at the bedside, virtual nurses can do some of the admissions intake for patients as well as discharge instruction and education. This frees up bedside nurses to do other patient care duties. The goal of virtual nursing is not only to be a satisfier for patients but also a satisfier for bedside nurses.
   
• The facility will manage a centralized staffing pool for nurses, therapists, technologists, and other healthcare workers. That team will use Epic dashboards that have real-time information on high patient volume, then shift staff to areas with high need.

Sareli says the new center addresses a need to improve care management and coordination.

"It was essential for us to leverage technology, people, standard processes, and innovation to put together the Care Coordination Center to lock down multiple processes, including our capacity management for patients, patient transfers, virtual patient observation, and virtual nursing," he says.

Improving safety, care quality

The facility is expected to drive positive outcomes, Sareli explains.

"Ultimately, we not only want to improve patient experience but also improve quality and safety for our patients," he says.

"What we are looking to do is get the patient as quickly and efficiently as possible to the right care destination," he says. "For example, if a patient needs to be in the ICU to receive intensive care, we want to get that patient out of the emergency department as quickly as possible. Getting the patient into the right environment is always going to enhance patient safety and quality."

One critical function of the center, Sareli adds, is to track and improve the patient journey from beginning to end.

"When we look at throughput in our health system and the way patients transition from entry and exit at a hospital, anytime we can do anything to improve efficiency will improve quality and safety," he says.

Improving management of staffing will drive positive outcomes, according to Sareli.

"We have a relatively innovative strategy to have teams look at staffing," he says. "They can identify places in the health system that have increased patient volume and increased needs, then send more staff to the bedside in areas that need more staffing. This also contributes to patient safety and quality."

This also extends to virtual nursing.

"This capability is not replacing the bedside nurses, but the bedside nurses are better able to focus on delivering care," he says. "The virtual nurses can get the right intake information and give the right discharge instructions. This improves quality and safety."

Photo: Dashboards display real-time data at Memorial Healthcare System's  Care Coordination Center. Photo by Michael Hopkins Photography.