Abstract
The Cardiac Surgery Advancing Care, Treatment Efficiency, Innovation, Value, and Teamwork for Cardiac Episodes (ACTIVATE) team is using data analytics to identify areas of improvement that will help streamline their workflow and decrease hospital length of stay. Goals are set for various metrics and milestones throughout the process. When the goals are not met, team members document the variance (reason). Initially, this documentation was done via spreadsheet, which was tedious, time consuming, and often completed long after the event happened. A Care Path was created in MiChart to replace documentation of the variances in a spreadsheet. An alert will fire when a particular goal has not been met, allowing clinicians to seamlessly capture the variance in real time without disrupting their work.
A Care Path diagram is available within MiChart and displays where the patient is along the path. Real-time reports based on variance data allow the team to track progress and find specific workflows that need to be addressed. Several improvements have been realized since implementation of the Care Path tool including: 5-minute decrease in time spent recording variances for each missed goal; elimination of errors and rework stemming from manual input; increased clinician awareness with regard to the patient’s progress along the care path; a 1-day reduction in length of stay for Valve patients, a 1.4% reduction in Sub-Acute Nursing Facility (SNF) utilization, and a 1.9% reduction in 30-day readmissions. The decrease in length of stay has resulted in a gain of 1.7 beds per day on average.