Hartford Business Journal

www.HartfordBusiness.com • December 18, 2017 • Hartford Business Journal 15 operating officer, agrees. The logistics hub is the result of a de- cade or more of work, he said. "It's a historic disruption to the way we work," Flaks said. It's not a regular occur- rence that Hartford Hospital, which is a comprehensive trauma center, can't admit a seriously sick or injured patient, but it does happen. Those patients might end up at Yale or in Boston instead. "We don't want to say 'no,' " Ciotti said. Soon, they may be saying it less often. During the second full month of opera- tion in November, the logistics center transferred 52 patients to one of Hartford HealthCare's community hospitals. Just months ago, virtually all of them would have ended up at Hartford Hospital. The community hospitals previously only re- ceived inpatient transfers from their own emergency rooms. The goal is to reduce the number of transfer denials to zero, Orlando said. Available assets Hospital beds are valuable assets, and staffing empty ones can be expensive. A more even distribution of patients to available beds can only help Hartford HealthCare's community hospitals, some of which are emptier than others. According to state data, the 144-bed Windham Hospital has seen the greatest decline in bed occupancy, which fell from 33 percent in 2013 to 16 percent in 2016. Meanwhile, 373-bed MidState Medical Center's occupancy rate fell to 60 percent in 2016 from 74 percent in 2013. Backus has had relatively flat occupancy in the 55 to 57 percent range, while Hospital of Central Connecticut's occupancy since 2013 has ticked up 5 percentage points, to 60 percent. Hartford Hospital has maintained an approximate 80 percent occupancy rate in recent years, compared to the statewide average of 76 percent. Both Flaks and Orlando said they expect to see those occupancy rates rise as a result of the logistics center's work. "Even a modest increase in occupancy rates makes sense to us," Orlando said, referring to the logistics hub's return on investment. Hartford Hospital has the greatest ca- pabilities within the Hartford HealthCare system, and like the flagships of most health systems, that makes it the costliest to operate on a per-bed basis. Ensuring it can accept the sickest patients, which often produce the most revenue, is also part of the equation, Orlando said. Patient logistics efforts are also often centered around bringing in more pa- tients overall in the long run, said Scott Newton, vice president of care model solutions for Pittsburgh-based Teletrack- ing, which has helped approximately 100 hospitals and systems build logistics cen- ters (and is not involved in the Hartford HealthCare project). "It's a game of minutes, actually," New- ton said of patient logistics. "You might save three, four, five minutes. When you scale that through all the patients that come through a health system on any day, month or year, those add up quickly." Data driven The logistic center's real-time informa- tion that nurses and others use is pro- vided through Epic, a healthcare software company. But another company, General Electric, is helping Hartford HealthCare make sense of its data. As part of a seven-year contract with Hartford HealthCare that also includes un- related radiology services, GE will mine the system's past data — a complicated pro- cess because the hospitals used different record-keeping systems in the past — to provide a baseline to evaluate performance against moving forward, Ciotti said. Wait times and the number of patients transferred to community hospitals will be among the key metrics. Before the new system went live, Hartford Hospital took in upward of 700 transfers a month. Ciotti expects to see that number, when applied across five hospitals, to rise significantly. Nurses who work in Hartford HealthCare's Newington logistics center include (clockwise from top left): Carolyn Bousquet, Jessica LeRoux, Sue Fortier and Jessica Costa. VIEW THE GIVING GUIDE BY GOING TO WWW.HARTFORDBUSINESS.COM CLICK ON 'SPECIAL EDITIONS' LOOKING TO GIVE BACK THIS HOLIDAY SEASON? YOU WILL FIND A FULL GUIDE PACKED WITH WONDERFUL ORGANIZATIONS TO GIVE BACK TO

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