Yale New Haven Hospital launches new Capacity Command Center

New Haven, CT (Jan. 26, 2018) – As a part of ongoing efforts to provide unparalleled value to its patients, Yale New Haven Hospital (YNHH) launched an innovative Capacity Command Center (CCC) that combines real-time data analytics with physical co-location of key operational services to enhance coordination, safety, quality, timeliness, and efficiency in patient care. The CCC was developed jointly by the Yale New Haven Health Clinical Redesign initiative, the YNHH in-house analytics staff, and Epic in Verona, WI.

YNHH is now five years into an ambitious journey to become a high reliability organization, where a shared set of cultural values promote the provision of reliably safe, high quality and patient centered care in a complex and dynamic operating environment. YNHH continues to experience the highest patient volumes in Connecticut, and transfers from other hospitals have substantially increased patient acuity. The CCC is a natural outgrowth of the High Reliability journey, and is a manifestation of YNHH’s commitment to enhancing all aspects of patient care.

“Through the CCC, we’re using the enormous amounts of data available from Epic and other sources to improve care, safety and the patient experience,” said Ohm Deshpande, MD, director, Utilization Review and Clinical Redesign, YNHHS. “The center provides the right information to the right people at the right time, to enable the right actions.”

The CCC innovates in two major ways. First, it leverages the huge amounts of operational data generated by the Epic electronic health record and generates dashboards that allow nurses, physicians and administrators to react to changing conditions in real time. The data directly drive process changes. Second, representatives from all relevant operational areas are physically located in one location to facilitate easy communication and coordination. This is essential to ensure that we operate at peak levels at all times, and especially when admitted patient volumes are surging.

“Yale New Haven Hospital cares for the most complicated patients in our region. The Command Center’s people, processes and data infrastructure will allow us to gain unparalleled real-time insight into our operations, keep the patient at the center of all that we do, and enhance our ability to provide the highest value care. This has never been done in such a large and complex medical center in New England.” said Richard D’Aquila, president of Yale New Haven Hospital and Yale New Haven Health.

Both major components of the CCC have already had positive impact. The dashboards were developed to show a variety of real-time metrics such as bed capacity, bed cleaning turnaround time, patient transport times, delays for procedures and tests, ambulatory utilization and quality and safety indicators. The dashboards, which are visible on the command center screens as well as accessible through Epic by physicians and staff alike, radically increase real-time operational transparency.

The physical co-location of key operational services, like bed management, patient transport, the Emergency Department, Environmental Services, nursing staffing, and care coordination, has increased collaborative critical thinking because staff can speak in real time about how to make sure patients are in the right place at the right time and receive the care they need. The increased access to data has already driven process changes. For example, the infection prevention staff can identify all patients in the hospital with Foley catheters, review their charts, and have discussions with nurses and physicians about removing the catheters, since prolonged Foley catheter use directly relates to catheter-associated urinary tract infections.

Yale New Haven Hospital and Epic are leading the way in developing technology and front line processes to radically enhance real time process improvement in a way that enhances quality, safety, and patient centeredness in healthcare while identifying and eliminating wasted resources from their operations.