Patient flow - in the simplest terms - is a patient's physical journey through a hospital; from arrival into A&E, to transfer to investigations or treatment, to discharge.

Poor patient flow can result in difficult scenarios for healthcare providers, including emergency departments crowded with patients waiting to be transferred or admitted, patients being admitted to hospital wards not best-suited to their care (e.g. a medical patient admitted to a surgical ward), inpatients being moved around to different wards to accommodate new admissions, and delays to surgical procedures.

All of the above can lead to poor patient experience in hospitals, high pressure and stress for staff, and worse clinical outcomes. Ensuring efficient patient flow requires good management of patients’ journeys through different stages of care - treatment, tests, surgery, recovery and discharge planning - with minimal delays. What happens in community care can also have a knock-on effect on the situation inside a hospital, so patient flow begins even before a patient comes through the hospital doors, and carries on out of it.

Managing patient flow

Some hospitals have Patient Flow Coordinators, Patient Flow Managers, or Bed Managers to support communication and coordination within and between wards, departments, clinical teams and services outside the hospital (e.g. community teams, social care, GPs).

Patient Flow Coordinators or Bed Managers may walk around every ward multiple times a day or spend time calling them to find out the status of beds. They then come together physically at fixed times and places to discuss demand, planned discharges, and where space may become available for admissions or movement of patients between wards. All of this is very time-consuming and inefficient - every visit to a ward only gives a snapshot in time, and has to be repeated often.

Integrated digital care coordination can make a huge difference to the efficiency and accuracy of bed and patient flow management. It provides an accurate, up to date picture of beds and a reliable forward-look at discharges. Teams can proactively identify and unblock tasks that cause delays and prioritise patients and allocate beds appropriately.

Infinity is a valuable electronic Bed and Capacity Management System (eBCMS) for Patient Flow Coordinators, Bed Managers, clinical staff, and operational staff, helping improve patient flow in a number of ways:

Care is more integrated
Patients are often seen by multiple health and care professionals across a variety of departments before, during, and after a hospital stay.
With a tool like Infinity, that allows real-time sharing of information accessible by all relevant professionals from anywhere, multidisciplinary teams can work together more effectively to meet their patients’ needs. This improved access to knowledge supports improved collaboration and prioritisation, which can help improve decision-making and patient flow.
Patients are transferred more quickly
When streamlined clinical task management is made possible through digital platforms like Infinity, the transfer of patients is accelerated - getting them to where they need to be more quickly and more efficiently. Clinical and operational staff can be granted access to real-time updates, meaning that once a medical decision is made, the physical transportation of the patient to another part of the hospital is easier to coordinate.
Delays and blockages are easier to identify
With real-time visibility of all activity, from bed-management to granular task-level, ward and site managers can understand where there might be unnecessary delays or blockages, and more effectively respond to them. For example, it is clear to see the reason that a patient discharge or transfer is delayed, so decisions can be made to maintain patient flow. This may also have a positive impact on patient transfers as appropriate beds become available.
Bed management is less time-consuming
Admissions, discharges, and transfers are automatically recorded, removing the need for bed managers to spend time visiting and calling wards to ascertain upcoming discharges and transfers. Admissions and other transfers are therefore much easier and less time-consuming to plan and coordinate, and patient flow is improved.
Medically fit patients can be discharged sooner
Discharge delays and increased demand contribute to poor patient flow. Health and social care systems that have adopted best practice to improve flow find themselves much better able to cope with external pressures than those that have not.
A care coordination tool allows clinical staff to see the status of a patient at a glance, as well as what action or treatments are required before discharge is possible. For example, a patient may be medically fit for discharge, but need medication to take home before they can leave hospital. If the pharmacy team had access to a digital task management platform, they could easily see which patients were waiting for a prescription as a last step before discharge and prioritise it or be notified; thus creating better patient flow back into the community.

Now more than ever, maintaining good patient flow is vital to support hospitals and community organisations manage their patients efficiently and safely. Staff need to have the right tools to manage their caseload and communicate with each other, allowing them to plan discharges effectively, have a forward view of available beds, and identify blockages.

Not only does this improve patient flow through hospitals, but patients have a better experience because their care is more joined-up.

Infinity for Patient Flow