Capacity Coordination Center 

The Capacity Coordination Center was conceived to accelerate process improvement by enhancing timely, efficient, safe, and patient centered care in a way that facilitates operational transparency, and reduces unnecessary redundancy.

Building on lessons learned through the successful Safe Patient Flow initiative, the Capacity Coordination Center enables Yale New Haven Health to enhance value by promoting:

• Real-time communication
• Inter/Intradepartmental and interdisciplinary collaboration
• Staff empowerment
• Standardization of best practices
• Institutional memory
• Enhancing operational transparency through real time data drawn from the Epic electronic health record (EHR)

The core of the CCC, two interventions addressed all five of these opportunities:

• Co-location of key personnel
• Information-technology

The premise of the CCC is simple: bring together the right people, arm them with the right information, and they’ll make the right decision.

Capacity Coordination Center team

The Capacity Coordination Center is staffed 24/7 by multiple patient care departments and staff responsible for local operations. This core multi-disciplinary team serves as the hub for additional standing and ad-hoc huddles with core hospital functions. The Center includes senior leadership from Yale New Haven Health and Yale School of Medicine and an advisory board of executives that span physician/patient access, clinical operations, clinical redesign and utilization, and internal consultation for the Health System.

Dashboards

Yale New Haven Health has been on the Epic electronic health record since 2011, and has internally developed analytics staff to create data visualizations that display actionable information.  For the first time, Epic Systems, in Verona WI, has partnered with YNHHS to enable real-time analytics based in the Epic environment.

The collaboration between Clinical Redesign, our data analysts, and Epic has enabled the creation of innovative dashboards that provide real time insight into inbound patients and transfers, bed capacity, discharges, bed turnaround time, clinical patient safety indicators, and myriad other data key to anticipating and mitigating capacity management and patient safety issues. These dashboards, which can display data at the hospital down to the patient level, track key indicators against goals and past performance, prompt warnings and trigger corrective processes, and provide transparency and access for cross-disciplinary problem-solving.

Co-location

Co-locating selected operational services has created synergies by enabling collaborative and creative thinking about how to improve care. Telephonic communications and siloed operational insights have been replaced by face-to-face conversations and open-data access.

Institutional memory

The Capacity Coordination Center is built on a model of continuous improvement. The CCC leadership team records solutions created by the team in a playbook for future reference and improvement, and collaborates with the information technology group to update dashboards and automate appropriate steps of the improved processes. Additionally, if operational defects recur, the Clinical Redesign team is deployed to implement practical and sustainable process improvement.


Learn more about more about Yale New Haven Health Clinical Redesign