Ballad Health will transition patient bed management to a centralized location, facilitated by the Patient Flow Center team within the Clinical Command Center, effective Wednesday, Nov. 1. With this change, we will manage patient placement and bed availability in real time.
NOTE: The go-live was initially scheduled for Oct. 17 but was rescheduled to Nov. 1.
Our health system, like others nationwide, has been struggling with severe staffing shortages. To help ensure these challenges don’t affect the quality and safety of patient care, we have streamlined key processes to better manage them through a centralized, more efficient and uniform approach.
- This helps us manage bed supply to identify bottlenecks and act quickly to place patients in the most appropriate care setting based on their acuity and needs.
- It will ensure we make the best use of our resources, such as beds and staffing. This will give the health system a more direct line of sight into overall patient flow and care. Bed placement will include transfers, ER admissions, direct/future admissions, and any surgery/procedural admissions.
- Along with this change, we have created a more robust dashboard and criteria for supporting patient throughput using Epic best practices and tools.
Contacting the Patient Flow Center
- All bed requests must be placed in Epic.
- Use Epic Secure Chat except for emergent bed requests. For those, call the Ballad Health Patient Flow Center at 423-952-5775.
Go-Live Assistance
More resources
- Click here to access EVS tip sheets (located on the Ballad Health intranet).
- Click here to access Transport tip sheets (located on the intranet).
- Click here to access Patient Flow Coordinator tip sheets (located on the intranet).
On Ballad Health News
- Click here to read more details in our initial announcement about centralized patient bed management.
- Click here to read more about the Clinical Command Center.
