How 'Top Gun' and Tech Are Improving Patient Transfers

Bon Secours Mercy Health is using a new tech platform to make its patient transfers in the Toledo area more efficient. Maverick and Goose would approve.

How did Tom Cruise influence an Ohio health system’s efforts to improve patient transfers?

Actually, the actor had nothing to do with Bon Secours Mercy Health’s need for efficiency in moving patients from its smaller hospitals to larger facilities. But his Top Gun character’s “Need for Speed” motto has been embraced by the seven-hospital network in and around Toledo to create a tech-driven platform to improve transfers.

“When you have patients that are boarding at a rural hospital waiting to get transferred, you know that's quite a burden for those sites,” says Chris Freeman, RN, BSN, Manager of Central Staffing and Scheduling at Bon Secours Mercy Health Toledo. “We needed to make everything as smooth as possible.”

The so-called Top Gun initiative is a partnership between Mercy Health Toledo and Conduit Health Partners, a care coordination company launched out of the health system in 2018. The program creates a transparent tech platform that allows the health system to see into each hospital and coordinate non-emergency transfers, most often to Mercy Health-St. Vincent Medical Center, the network’s only Level One trauma center.

The platform is also integrated with the health system’s Epic EHR, ensuring that patient data flows smoothly between each hospital.

The initiative moves well beyond the old practice of calling around looking for open beds, while keeping patients, their families and transportation services in limbo and forcing St. Vincent staff (and those of other metro-area hospitals) to constantly juggle incoming transfers with their own patient census. That often meant making several calls or sending off multiple e-mails, while patients and their families waiting in the ED.

Freeman said the first phase of the project was to examine how smaller hospitals moved their patients to St. Vincent or another metro facility. The typical process, he says, was to wait for a bed to become open, then start the transfer. That might force executives to keep a patient in one hospital longer than necessary, clogging up the ED and making things difficult for clinicians and the patient and family.

Phase two of the project looked beyond St. Vincent, envisioning scenarios where that hospital was too full to accept new patients. Executives worked with Conduit Health Partners to create a dashboard that tracks bed status at all hospitals in the network, enabling the health system to move patients to a hospital with an available bed.

“We are able to get the right patients to the right hospital in an expedited time,” Freeman says.

By using technology to track hospital beds, patient status and other data, health system executives are getting a real-time map of the network, enabling them to spot bottlenecks and delays, often before they happen, and act quickly to coordinate resources, much like traffic control supervisors at an airport.

Freeman says Operation Top Gun – credit for the name goes to Chief Operating Officer James Weidner, who saw the delays and remarked “I feel the need for speed” – has proven its value. According to a case study prepared by Conduit Health Partners, the health system has reduced average patient transfer times by 34%, increased weekly direct admissions to metro hospitals by 54%, and reduced the total number of communications required for transfers by 12%.

There are also unmeasured benefits. The health system’s smaller hospitals now have a much better idea of their bed availability, staff can more easily initiate transfers knowing that a patient will be moved quickly to an appropriate care site, and patients and their families won’t be stuck where they can’t receive the right care or shuttled about in hopes of finding an open bed.

Freeman says the program was mapped out using Lean Six Sigma concepts and balancing new technology with change management. Hospital staff were introduced gradually to the new program and the changes in workflows that it created.

There was also an understanding that more changes could lie ahead as executives and staff fine-tune the platform.

“It's not like we said, ‘All right, this is what we're doing.’ We set it and forget it,’” he notes. “We are dedicated to continuously improving this process.”