Are you looking for a command center for your hospital, or possibly one for your region?  If so, you need to ensure that the model you choose has the right functionality.

Are you looking for a command center for your hospital, or possibly one for your region?  While you’re probably a bit too late to be considered an early adopter, you’re definitely in the mainstream.  Command centers are showing great potential, positively impacting metrics related to patient transfers, ED holds, quality, patient progression, discharges, etc.  You might also guess, however, that not all command centers are created equal.

 There is a popular analogy comparing hospital command centers to NASA’s mission control.  Deeper analysis of this analogy, however, raises a question whether these command centers are designed to only deliver half a solution.  The decision process during a NASA mission is a coordinated effort melding mission control’s data with real-time knowledge and conditions on the spacecraft known only by the astronauts.  This open collaboration should be the case in healthcare.  The best results are achieved using a more coordinated hub-and-spoke approach combining knowledge from all relevant sources:

• The hospital-wide perspective of a command center (the hub)
• The patient-centric knowledge and compassion of the front-line (spoke)
• Real-time awareness of diagnostic areas (spoke)
• Pre-defined standard operating procedures designed to work hand-in-hand with multiple software applications (hub and spoke)
• Historical analytics and standard practices to drive continuous improvement (hub and spoke).

Reduced reimbursements, new and changing regulations, retail competition, personnel shortages and a more demanding consumer are only a few of the challenges facing hospitals today.  Compared to the traditional command center model, a hub-and-spoke model empowering your entire organization is a more effective way to address these challenges, achieve operational excellence and realize the full benefit from your investment.