One of the key principles of Lean Thinking is to eliminate delays which consume up to 95% of the total cycle time. If you’ve ever been a patient in Live in care Agency a hospital emergency room or bed, you know there are lots of delays. Over the years, health care has made tremendous strides in reducing cycle time in various aspects of care. Outpatient surgeries are one example: arrive in the morning and leave in the afternoon. No bed required. But there is still room for improvement.
Goal: Accelerate the Patient’s Experience Medistaff24 Home care agency of Health Care
Emergency Room
Focus on a key metric called takt time. Takt means rhythm. For the sake of simple analysis, let’s say that your ER handles:
– 120 patients/day
– That would equate to 5/hour
– Or one every 12 minutes
Unfortunately, patients don’t arrive in a rhythmic fashion, they arrive in waves. The biggest wave is between 3pm and 9pm due to rush hour traffic accidents, parents picking up sick kids from daycare and so on. The smallest wave is usually 3am to 9am. So let’s say patients arrive 2-3/hour at off-peak times and 10/hour at peak times.