Quality Improvement Initiative Increasing Early Discharges From an Acute Care Cardiology Unit for Cardiac Surgery and Cardiology Patients–Associated With Reduced Hospital Length of Stay

ABSTRACT: Introduction: Discharging patients from the acute care setting is complex and requires orchestration of many clinical and technical processes. Focusing on timely discharges improves throughput by off-loading ICUs and coordinating safe outpatient transitions. Our data review demonstrated most discharges occurred later in the day. We sought to improve our discharge times for cardiology and cardiovascular surgery (CVS) patients in our 26-bed inpatient acute care cardiology unit (ACCU). We aimed to increase the number of discharges between 6 am and 12 pm for cardiology and CVS patients on ACCU from 5 to 10 patients per month over 6 months and sustain.

Methods:

We performed a simplified Failure Mode Effect Analysis on the discharge process and identified improvement opportunities. Our

SUBMITTER: Colyer J 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9345632 | biostudies-literature | 2022 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature