Improving Patient Flow and Access to Care at an Academically Affiliated Urban Safety-Net Hospital.

Psychiatr Serv

Department of Behavioral Health (Rylander, Klahr, Houlton, Sixta, Wolf, Piatz, Thurstone) and Department of Care Management and Patient Flow (Prandi-Abrams, Klahr), Denver Health Medical Center, Denver. Marcela Horvitz-Lennon, M.D., and Kenneth Minkoff, M.D., are editors of this column.

Published: August 2021

Access to inpatient psychiatric beds remains a significant barrier to care for patients having a mental health crisis. A quality improvement initiative described here was designed to increase access to care by increasing efficiency of health care delivery on an adult and adolescent inpatient psychiatric unit. Design and implementation centered on collaborative relationships among hospital administration, physician leadership, frontline physicians, and members of the multidisciplinary treatment team. Initial 5 months of data indicated significant improvements in care access as measured by number of encounters on both units. Reductions in length of stay were made possible by optimizing internal work flows and standardizing goals of hospitalization.

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Source
http://dx.doi.org/10.1176/appi.ps.202000379DOI Listing

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