Mount Sinai St. Luke's is a 300-bed hospital serving the Harlem and Morningside Heights communities of NYC.
They have approximately 100,000 ED visits annually and 12% of ED visits result in admission. The Emergency Department was consistently boarding 8-20 admitted patients daily, which can increase the opportunity for patient harm, frustrate staff, and negatively impact the patient experience.
A small, multidisciplinary kaizen team was tasked with reducing the time that patients wait in the ED for a bed to be ready. The team had to address many challenges including: limited visual management, multiple hand offs, variability in the process, work being performed in silos, and batching.
After each of these challenges was addressed Mount Sinai St. Luke's was able to get the median time from bed request to bed ready down to 1 hour and 58 minutes from 3 hours and 45 minutes, a 42% reduction.
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