By Douglass Dowty
syracuse.com
SYRACUSE, N.Y. — From Carrier Circle, a team of Upstate staffers monitor the ebbs and flows of patient care at University and Community General hospitals.
This “mission control” room, as hospital CEO Dr. Robert Corona describes it, expanded earlier this year into its new $2.4 million home. It now has 28 workstations and 22 live-feed monitors.
Before, it was housed in University Hospital’s basement, and before then, in a repurposed conference room.
The goal of the Throughput Operations Center is to identify bottlenecks and speed up patient care.
The control center can’t fix University Hospital’s broken ER, where people can wait 17 hours for a bed upstairs. But it can dispatch a transport team to whisk a patient upstairs 35 minutes faster than before the center was created, said Kyle Choquette , a registered nurse who runs the center.
If part of the hospital has a large number of empty rooms, the center can send a small army of environmental workers to get rooms ready for the next patients, shaving 20 minutes off the process.
The center has also cut 20 minutes off the wait to move a patient from the operating room area back to their bed. That’s helped keep the ORs operating on schedule, Choquette said.
None of those improvements may feel like much to a patient who spends too long waiting for care. But they add up for a hospital system that’s treating hundreds of patients each day.
The center’s first initiative was to streamline the process for discharging patients, from the ER to the operating rooms.
Across both hospitals, the center estimated that it sped up discharge by more than 5,000 hours (equivalent of 208 days) for 4,951 patients in 2022.
“It’s like the heartbeat of the hospital,” Corona said of the center.
The expanded center, in the Telergy Building on Route 298, includes an ambulance dispatcher to smooth out transitions between the two hospitals, as well as a camera trained on the hospital’s helipad, where the sickest get flown in from across 14 counties, Choquette said.
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