Page 46 - Managing the Mobile Workforce

discovering a new workforce paradigm � 25

That is just touching the surface. The badges can also contact
members of a stroke alert team who are scattered throughout the hos-
pital with just one voice command. And even that’s not all, according
to Brent:

Many times, emergency departments get overcrowded. When they get
overcrowded to a certain, severe degree they actually start turning am-
bulances away. They call it “diversion.” They can literally force an am-
bulance to go to another hospital. One of the things that we’ve been able to
do with some of our hospital customers is eliminate that problem through
the improvement of the work flow process of how they are handling their
emergency department.
The way it works is when the emergency department gets to a cer-
tain level of occupancy, they actually send out a broadcast alert message
to their Census Alert Team. The Census Alert Team knows that, based
on a newly defined process, if you are in housekeeping, you start cleaning
rooms. If you are a transport tech, you start moving patients out of the
emergency department. If you are a discharge clerk, you start discharging
patients as appropriate. It is amazing how much inefficiency is left in the
system and as a result you can get more people out of the hospital and more
beds emptied in the hospital to get people moved from the emergency de-
partment into the actual hospital thereby essentially creating more space
in the emergency department for new patients coming in.
We had a hospital here locally that had been on diversion for over
60 hours for three consecutive months and were on the verge of being
fined by the State of California because they had basically surpassed the
limit that was allowed in their environment. They implemented this
new process with basically different colors representing different levels of
urgency. It is just like our national security, with green, yellow, orange,
and red. Based on creating this gate system using these colors and pre-
defined workflow processes, they were able to eliminate diversion from
their emergency department completely. That is an example where, yes,
communication played a role in it but it was a question of us coming in
and enabling them to create a whole new process for how they manage
people inside of that environment.