The Key to Resolving Progression Barriers Faster

See How Focus on Patient Progression Cuts Barrier Resolution Times

By Barbara Anzilotti, MSN

When patients encounter barriers to progression, they often miss their target discharge date. As patients spend avoidable days in the hospital, they risk infection and injury and occupy rooms that could otherwise be used for new patients. Care teams also spend too much valuable time away from the bedside resolving barriers.

Where do care teams spend most of their efforts on progression barriers?  Can we do better?

Through an independent study done by Care Logistics, we were able to identify:

• Where care teams spend the most time resolving barriers

• How much time is lost on average for each barrier category

• The impact a patient progression focus can have on progression barriers

Discharge barriers take the longest to resolve and are the most likely to impact your patients’ length of stay. Medical/Progression barriers are similar, taking up both the 2nd most time overall and taking the 2nd longest to resolve. The Other category, while less frequent, still takes an average of 3 days to resolve.

So, how can you reduce the time your care teams are spending resolving these barriers? Putting a Patient Progression strategy in place can drastically improve the speed at which these barriers are resolved.

These resolution times can have a major impact on your patients’ length of stay. For example, let’s see how a Discharge barrier can impact care when an effective Patient Progression strategy is not in place:

Despite being identified early in the patient’s stay, the barrier still took 5.3 days to resolve, adding over 2 days to the patient’s overall LOS.

Now, let’s see how care is impacted when Patient Progression has been improved:

Even though these barriers were both identified at the same time, the barrier was able to be resolved before the patient’s length of stay was extended through a proper Patient Progression strategy.