Dive Brief:
- A comprehensive patient tracking program helped Mount Sinai Medical Center cut waIt times by more than an hour for about half of those coming into the emergency department.
- The technology used by the New York hospital included algorithms sifting through patient EMRs to find triage instructions from nurses, as well as RFID tags matching new patients with appropriate open beds.
- Given the need for better matching of patients to beds, bed-management applications have come to be one of the hottest software markets, according to a HIMSS Analytics report published earlier this year.
Dive Insight:
Hospitals have been experimenting with bed management technologies for many years now. Maybe, after all of that experimentation, the addition of EMRs to the mix has brought things to a tipping point. If so, hospitals may be able to jump on these technologies and increase their throughput (and income). This could just the ticket for hospitals struggling with traffic shifting to outpatient care.