Future Bet: Care Traffic Control

Vision & Goals

We need a new way to manage and create capacity for our clinicians and our hospitals. We need meaningful nudges and real-time workflow management that get patients to the right place at the right time. We need scalable coordination that helps us focus on those patients who can remain in the community versus those who need to travel to the hospital. We also need to identify those patients who can get information, reminders and home checks versus those that need to come to an in-person physician visit. 

Our Solution 

To address these needs and others, we use a “care traffic control” center with centralized monitoring, virtual nursing and “sitters” for our patients. This set-up gives us a second set of eyes on our intensive care unit (ICU) and emergency department (ED) patients, remote monitoring to check on acute patients, and limits telemetry to those who really need that level of support. Each of these programs has integrated AI that nudges patients and clinicians to take action when needed — thus making the “care traffic control” center fiscally responsible.

Next Steps

The success metrics are undeniable: length of stay has decreased from 3.6 to 2.52 days, 30-day inpatient readmissions are down across all specialties, and our mortality rate has dropped from 0.24 to 0.20. With its proven success, we are expanding this model across inpatient settings, our Accountable Care Organization (ACO) and patients in our physician practices.