By Healthcare Facilities Today

Using tactics more common to retail and manufacturing, the expanded University of Colorado Hospital's emergency department (ED) has been able to reduce wait times from 80 minutes to around 10, says an article in the Denver Post.

The new ED opened in April and doubles the size of the former space, serving around 230 people a day.

The redesign uses many strategies to cut down on wasted travel time. For example, the ambulance entrance bay is a semi circle, allowing ambulances to pull cleanly through the driveway instead of having to execute a K turn — pulling in, turning and backing up.

The ED is organized into zones. Patients coming in through the front entrance first encounter the pivot area, where they are given a wristband for tracking, placed in a wheelchair and wheeled to the appropriate zone. Directly behind the pivot is the "rapid intake" area for less-urgent cases and behind that is the "super track" area where minor treatments are addressed.  More serious cases are treated in other zones where service functions, such as resuscitation and imaging, are more closely integrated than before, the article says.

Other EDs are taking similar steps to streamline operations. Another example cited in the article, Denver Health Medical Center, used Lean principles in its ED redesign and periodically reviews how many trips staff have to take through hallways in order to perform one treatment to see where efficiencies could be gained.

Read the article.