Children’s Mercy Kansas City increases access to care after launching command center

Children’s Mercy Kansas City has a vision of creating a world of wellbeing for children. As a level-one freestanding pediatric hospital, its clinicians see a child for care more than half a million times each year. The hospital serves a wide geographical area with the closest alternative pediatric hospitals in St. Louis and Denver. Children’s Mercy takes pride in being a Magnet-certified hospital, a designation that recognizes the organization’s commitment to staff teamwork and clinical outcomes. The hospital has also been voted one of America’s best children’s hospitals and is ranked in all eleven specialties by U.S. News and World Report.[1]

To help deliver on the hospital’s commitment to children’s health, operational efficiency is a top priority across the organization. To revolutionize care delivery through innovation, Children’s Mercy collaborated with GE HealthCare to create the nation’s first pediatric hospital operations center known as the Patient Progression Hub. Stephanie Meyer, Senior Vice President and Chief Nursing Officer at Children’s Mercy shared how these innovations are shaping the future of pediatric care delivery.

Collaborating to develop a command center

Enhanced operational efficiency at Children’s Mercy benefits patients, families, and staff. The organization strives to make sure that clinicians can provide high-quality care to patients at the right time and in the right place. Increased efficiency can help boost the organization’s ability to do that while ensuring the patient and their family have a better experience.

With staffing challenges and pipeline issues a top concern for its leaders, Children’s Mercy is focused on improving clinician efficiency and streamlining their daily workflows to create gains that positively impact staff and patients.

Improving the care delivery experience for patients and staff is a central premise of the Patient Progression Hub, which launched in May 2023. The 6000-square-foot command center allows Children’s Mercy to co-locate key clinical and operational staff to foster communication and collaborative problem-solving. Operational staff and care teams can make data-driven decisions using information from GE HealthCare’s Command Center Tiles, which are apps that power the central hub of operations.

“The ability to help a patient through our system from point of entry to point of exit with everybody seeing the data at the same time has been instrumental in our ability to drive towards increased efficiency,” explained Meyer.

Focusing on outcomes

Children’s Mercy uses technology paired with process improvements to fuel innovation that elevates care delivery. By synthesizing real-time data from the EMR and other systems, the Command Center Tiles provide actionable insights that operational and care teams need to optimize capacity, expedite discharges, and streamline throughput.

Just a few months following the opening of the Patient Progression Hub, the hospital began to see measurable benefits, including:

• Improving access to care – The Patient Progression Hub helps staff proactively manage capacity and resources. As a result, Children’s Mercy has increased access to care.  Improved operational efficiency helped Children’s Mercy reduce avoidable days by 24%, opening up capacity for 300 additional patients on Med/Surg floors. By optimizing constrained resources, the hospital has decreased deferrals by 94%. And, transfers have been streamlined. With a 20% decrease in average transfer time from the PICU to the floor, the team has created 23 bed days of capacity.[2]
• Decreasing time to discharge -  The Tiles enable care teams to identify and manage discharges today and tomorrow, allowing everyone to be on the same page for timely discharges. Staff in the Hub can work on resolving discharge barriers while the nurse on the floor is providing actual hands-on care. “It's been remarkable to watch how our time of discharge order to actual discharge has decreased dramatically with the use of this technology,” said Meyer.
• Managing seasonal surges - To optimize hospital-wide planning for winter surges, Children’s Mercy uses GE HealthCare’s Digital Twin technology. Now, they are better equipped to predict when surges will hit, what diagnoses are likely to be most prevalent, and what kind of resources the hospital will need to allocate to open additional bed space during the surge. As a result, Children’s Mercy can have the space prepared in advance and be prudent with resource allocation. Valuable healthcare staff can be onboarded, trained, and assigned when and where they are needed.
• Responding to disasters – The Patient Progression Hub was integral to planning and managing the hospital’s response to the Kansas City Chief’s 2024 Super Bowl rally parade. At the event, 33 people were wounded in a mass shooting event, including 12 pediatric patients. “Having the Hub, with all of that information integrated with the EMR and available in one place--along with a key group of team members co-located so we could talk to each other--made our response to that absolutely one we are really proud of,” shared Meyer.

Teamwork and technology deliver powerful results

Following the opening of their Patient Progression Hub, Children’s Mercy has significantly reduced wait times, deferrals, and delays — while census and the number of surge days (where occupancy goes above 90%) remained similar and inpatient admissions increased by 2.8%².

Launching the Patient Progression Hub is just the beginning of the collaboration between Children’s Mercy Kansas City and GE HealthCare Command Center. “I'm excited about the future and our partnership with GE HealthCare,” said Meyer. “This relationship can change the landscape of pediatric healthcare as we work together to understand how to grow pediatric care so it's available to whoever needs it at that time.”

Read the complete case study to learn more about how the Patient Progression Hub is helping Children’s Mercy Kansas City increase capacity and improve access to care.

 

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