CHI Franciscan, a Tacoma, Washington based Catholic nonprofit health system, recently announced the launch of a Mission Control Center that would focus on optimizing care for patients, enhancing their services, and boosting their capacity to handle more patients in its acute care hospitals across 8 locations.
The institution has one of the biggest health systems in the state of Washington, with a 1300 beds capacity. More than 325,000 patients visit their healthcare centers for emergencies, and they handle more than 300,000 in-patients every year.
Objectives of the Mission Control Center
They established the Mission Control Center in collaboration with GE Healthcare. It aims at harnessing the power of advanced analytics and Artificial Intelligence for coordinating patient care across their healthcare system so that the procedure of healthcare delivery can be streamlined and health outcomes can be improved.
Key aspects of healthcare include forecasting demand, progressing care, transferring between facilities, planning discharge, etc. With the help of this Mission Control Center, hospital staff will be able to direct their resources to regions of high need, so that the best care can be provided to patients in need.
The Mission Control Center would be highly helpful for the healthcare teams to provide the highest quality service to the patients, increase their accessibility, and enhance the experience of the patients and their families.
Inspiration from NASA
The Mission Control Center of CHI Franciscan has been inspired by the Mission Control Center of NASA. It is equipped with a video wall of 18 screens, featuring 12 analytic tiles that show real-time data from all the institution’s hospitals. AI algorithms are used to detect any issues in real-time so that healthcare teams can solve them in time and provide better care to the patients. This way, they don’t need to wait for the issues to arise before they can react.
With the use of this cutting-edge technology, CHI Franciscan has become the first hospital system to do this in Washington and the 5th in the world. It is also the first body that has been supported by Microsoft Azure, which means that a very high level of security, privacy and protection is ensured while moving any important data to the cloud.
CHI Franciscan has been committed to using the latest innovation for the benefit of patients. The Mission Control Center has a structure that incorporates an office center having satellites at 3 hospitals, on-duty doctors, and use of Artificial Intelligence to resolve any potential problems. The use of Mission Control technology provides an all-inclusive overview of CHI Franciscan’s 8 hospitals. Along with that, it also improves patient care by supporting enhancements like:
- Streamlining resources wherever and whenever needed: The Mission Center allows centralization of hospital bed placement, with the help of which hospital staff is able to manage the assignment of beds in a much better way. With this system, beds are prioritized as per patient needs, and external transfers are placed accordingly. All in all, now patients can get the right bed at the right place at the right time, get transferred to the right facility, and get discharged in an easy and timely manner.
- Reducing patient waiting times: By analyzing data in real-time and resolving issues like delays, this Mission Control Center can reduce the amount of time patients spend waiting outside an emergency department. If a patient needs a PACU after the surgery, its availability can be assured by streamlining the disposal and discharge system.
- Having the right staff at the right time: AI can predict a patient’s census level pretty accurately a couple of days in advance. By predicting possible demand in near future, the hospital can take the needed actions, such as keeping beds ready, calling the required staff members at the right time, and assuring that the patients get the best care from the right healthcare teams.
- Organizing the discharge process: Based on real-time analytics and data, AI can predict each patient’s hospitalization time, including what can be the potential delays, and how waiting time can be reduced. By prioritizing the procedures, patients can be discharged sooner, so that the bed can be made available to another patient in need.
The hub of the Mission Control Center is located at Gig Harbor, and its three satellite locations are at Harrison Medical Center in Silverdale, St. Joseph Medical Center in Tacoma, and St. Francis Hospital in Federal Way. The Center has a complete team of physicians, nurses, supervisors, and other administrators, that have to work together to accelerate admissions, transfer patients to the right facilities, keeping a watch on bed capacity, etc. In the future, other focus areas will also be included, such as planning discharge, surgical flow, census prediction, etc.
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