Health Care Issues : Hospital Capacity Management & Patient Management Information from Accenture

Today's hospitals struggle to provide care in a time of economic volatility within an ailing national health care system.

Hospitals bear the burden of uncompensated care, declining reimbursement rates and shrinking resources, while incurring billions of dollars in bad debt each year. Accrediting organizations have established new standards for patient flow, including hospital capacity management and patient management. Meanwhile, many hospitals have closed, and many hospital beds have been eliminated. At the same time, an aging population is causing demand for health care services to rise.

As a result, many hospitals are experiencing severe capacity challenges. The problems range from a lack of available beds to exceedingly long waiting periods for emergency room patients, to an ever-increasing nursing shortage and overall poor patient flow. And they extend beyond hospitals' operations into strategy. Capacity constraints affect service quality and physician and patient satisfaction. They impede hospitals' ability to build new markets, service lines and revenue streams.

Patient flow integration and transformation is a solution to manage patient flow and address capacity problems by making key process and technology changes. If a hospital is successful in this initiative, then capacity management leads to a natural growth strategy and a corresponding increase in the revenue it can generate.

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Accenture offers a full range of capacity and care management consulting services to help providers better utilize their resources; improve their operating margins and reduce diversions in the emergency room, intensive care unit and trauma department. We have a seasoned, interdisciplinary team that understands the complexities of patient placement and can tailor leading practice solutions for quick implementation. Accenture delivers high performance through a track record of sustainable results working with our clients, which include the top 15 academic medical centers.

To date, Accenture's clients have realized significant gains from improved patient flow and more efficient care management, including significant reductions in length of stay, service delays and hours on diversions. Our clients typically realize a return on investment of more than four to one. We also help free capacity to provide room for service growth, including increased emergency visits and acute admissions. These achievements result from Accenture's innovative approach that marries process redesign with technology to deliver high performance.

Our team of clinical experts can help your organization to:

• Manage utilization to reduce costs, reduce length of stay and improve patient throughput.
  
  
• Match facility capacity to demand, based on your organization's strategic direction. We can help you to improve revenue through service growth by appropriately allocating beds based on level of care.
  
  
• Manage core processes to improve access, reduce service delays, minimize emergency room diverts, improve patient flow processes and enhance patient satisfaction.
  
  
• Align staff resources by flexing staff to meet demand. We help you increase predictability of staffing requirements and establish clear accountability for patient flow.

Accenture offers a flexible, collaborative approach that maintains a patient-centered philosophy with measured process improvements. We execute a program composed of three phases that occur almost simultaneously. First, we conduct a thorough evaluation of your existing patient flow and care management functions across the entire continuum. Next, we provide a series of recommendations to help improve your existing infrastructure and processes. Finally, we work collaboratively with you to support the redesign of processes and implementation of technologies to help you achieve high performance.

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