As hospitals continue to battle healthcare’s workforce shortage and high levels of staff turnover, capacity is a significant pain point. Hospitals can’t keep beds and operating rooms open to meet demands for patient care unless they have enough staff.

When it comes to technology to help optimize capacity management, hospital leaders want solutions that can automatically identify and prioritize patients who are ready for discharge using real-time data, according to a new report from healthcare software company Hospital IQ.

The company partnered with independent research firm Sage Growth Partners for the report, which involved qualitative interviews and gathered responses from 111 hospital and health system leaders. The leaders included CEOs, COOs, chief medical officers, chief nursing officers, chiefs of surgery and chief medical informatics officers.

The survey found that health system leaders expect their top priorities over the next several years to be increasing surgical volume, optimizing operating room utilization, decreasing patients’ average length of stay and streamlining the discharge process.

But managing capacity — for both inpatient beds and the operating room — can be difficult for hospitals. It requires staff members who are likely already burnt out to quickly balance and calculate a number of variables, including bed availability, staffing needs and patient throughput.

Hospitals often turn to technology to address the complexity of this issue, but they are still experiencing challenges leveraging data, according to the report. In fact, 73% of executives said they believe their data reporting should be improved to support daily operational decisions.

Many hospitals rely on their EHR to help with capacity management because they have already made such a significant investment in that technology, but EHRs don’t always use real-time data, the report said.

To produce fast and accurate insights on capacity management, technology platforms must operate on real-time data. But the report shows that hospitals’ use of real-time data to support daily operations is still low — only 39% of organizations rely on it.

The report also showed that hospital leaders think their organizations can do more to ensure efficient use of beds and operating room time. For example, on the surgical side of things, less than half of leaders said they would call their organization’s perioperative patient flow management good. And just 8% were extremely satisfied with their organization’s current operating room utilization levels.

Hospital leaders agreed that technology is needed to address their capacity management woes. They said they are seeking solutions that can use real-time data to accurately predict demand, automate operational workflows and catalyze the discharge process.

Without efficient capacity management and optimized resource utilization, hospitals will struggle to meet patients’ demands for care. This means that patients will be diverted away. This is less than ideal because 92% of leaders included in the survey said they consider their market to be competitive. During a time when hospital finances are incredibly tight, most organizations are not in a position to be missing out on revenue by turning patients away.

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