Early Success!

We tried a nurse-physician team with 3 stretchers in our old (empty) waiting room.  We did not change our old process; just added a parallel process out front.

An RN met all ambulatory arrivals at the front door for a quick look as before (pre-triage).  Ambulance patients came in through a separate process.  We ran the parallel RN-MD trial from 10:00 – 13:00.

Process

Patient arrives to see an RN screener/sorter/pre-triage.

Patient directed to an RN-MD team with 3 beds in the waiting room.

Patient sent to registration.

Patient sent home or to appropriate clinical area.

If RN-MD process overwhelmed, patient sent to traditional triage.

At any point, patient sent to acute room as indicated.

Results for 3 hour trial:

30 ambulatory patients seen (less than average volumes?)

Time to see MD = 0 minutes for 27 patients (< 3 minutes from RN screener).

3 patients direct to acute room by RN screener.

5 patients (17%) seen and discharged home by the MD-RN team

3 exam spots added (6% additional capacity) at ZERO cost.

0 left without being seen

0 patients required traditional triage

Reflection

We identified a number of things to improve for our relaunch next week.

Staff who had strongly opposed the trial turned optimistic.

As a team, we had become overly anxious to try new things after a major change ‘failed’ in 2012 (we tried something for 2 1/2 days that didn’t work as hoped).  We got a boost today.

We’ll share process detail and performance data as we gain more experience.

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