Emergency rooms get more efficient
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Long waits at the emergency room are the norm at many hospitals, and a source of frustration for patients and doctors. The emergency department at St. Joseph’s Medical Center in Stockton, operated by Dignity Health, sees about 275 patients each day. In the past two months, it has been able to shrink the amount of time it takes for a doctor to attend to an emergency room patient from around 30 minutes to less than 20 minutes.
What’s changed, according to Chairman of Emergency Medicine Dr. Benjamin Wiederhold, is bringing in Qventus, an analytics tool made by a Los Altos company of the same name.
Qventus’ software helps health care institutions manage staffing in hospitals and pharmacies. It processes data, including the number of patients and doctors in the hospital, the length of wait times, and where slowdowns are occurring, so that, for example, more nurses can be sent to the area of the hospital where they are most needed, or managers can get the latest information on what rooms need to be cleaned. It’s being used in around 50 hospitals nationwide.
Founder and CEO Mudit Garg used to be with a consulting firm, where he worked with health care providers to reduce inefficiencies. “The boring, unsexy operational problems were constantly coming across as really holding back,” he said.
Qventus provides a display that the company calls “air traffic control for hospitals” to see how efficiently the facility is running. It also sends “nudges” in texts, phone calls or email to health care providers to prevent
bottlenecks and redirect staff to busier areas. Using machine learning, the system observes what factors are important to each hospital and suggests ways to improve.
The company announced a collaboration with Sutter Health on Sept. 1 to install its software in 30 pharmacies in Sutter’s system. The startup, founded in 2013, has 50 employees and about $15 million in funding, Garg said.
Wiederhold said efficient hospitals make changes to their staffing and processes based on data that’s a month old. With Qventus’ analytics, his emergency department can make changes on the fly, and can tell in about three hours if those changes made a difference.
Qventus “allows us to see the entire department and have a real, live pulse on where the pinch points are and be able to respond to them,” Wiederhold said. “It’s a very powerful tool.” Also trending:
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