News | Published: Friday, October 6, 2023 10:00 pm
To learn more about efficiencies in the cath lab at UnityPoint Health, watch the on-demand session from CV Transforum Fall’23 (available soon). Download the slides from your attendee portal.
Procedural care optimization in the cath lab was the focus of the first general session on day two of CV Transforum Fall’23. Sharese Van Sloten, MHA, cardiovascular service line (CVSL) operations director, and Bryan Mullen, BAN, RN, MBA, CVSL program manager, knew that in order to form an efficient system level CVSL four years ago at UnityPoint Health in Des Moines, IA, they needed to standardize their processes and systems.
Van Sloten and Mullen began by working with MedAxiom’s Care Transformation Services team to evaluate the status of their system. They first identified their biggest challenges – a lack of consistency between and within their eight markets, which included 10 hospitals, 24 labs and 40 proceduralists. They also created an ideal vision of consistency and seamless communication between and within their markets, using their IT footprint as a key step to build their clinical strategy.
Van Sloten and Mullen started small with one market and engaged the frontline care team members in process mapping in the cath lab. This allowed team members to ensure that their priorities were built within the design of their system. They gathered information about when procedures happen, who performs the procedures and how to avoid delays, which ultimately reduced add-ons and provider burnout.
The team at UnityPoint gathered provider perspectives to determine how to follow a patient through the entire treatment process, from referral management through post-procedure management and coding/billing. They considered discrete steps in the process that could be streamlined, including a focus on prepping the patient before admission to reduce surprises on the day of arrival, breaking down barriers to and variations in care, and reducing duplicative work. This market level assessment in their ambulatory clinics and cardiovascular labs was driven by the value that their system placed on the best possible outcomes for each individual patient.
By aligning cost structures and revenue cycles, the team shifted away from “systemness” – a model of siloed institutions – toward their ideal state of one unified CVIS platform for cardiovascular documentation and imaging. To accomplish this, the team focused on optimizing their IT system to streamline workflows, support seamless communication, promote cross-regional collaboration, and be able to access real-time, clinically relevant data in their electronic health record.
Their system allowed them to improve physician efficiencies and address issues with provider burnout through schedule alignment and better communication. Ultimately, the return on data from interventional procedure and electrophysiology complications dashboards also allowed them to make decisions to optimize patient experiences, outcomes and throughput. They were also able to measure their success through growth in procedural volumes.
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