What am I missing? Bed days and admissions...
Is bed occupancy and patient flow data valuable for NHS hospitals? Who needs and how would might this data be used?
tldr: How can better information about bed occupancy and hospital admissions be used to help you and your team? Take our quick survey to let us know.
Some things really surprise me. For example bed days data. My understanding is that all hospitals report bed occupancy for national statistics quarterly. I believe clinicians rarely see this data until six weeks after the quarter end.
About three years ago, a Consultant in paediatric microbiology sent us a couple of screenshots from a colleague in a leading kids hospital. They showed an analysis of days of therapy (DOTs) per 1000 bed days for a specific medicine, Meropenem.
Triscribe bed days feature
He explained that standard DOTs don’t work well for kids because they are based on adult doses. It seemed a clear use case: normalising data such as days of therapy (DOTs) or defined daily doses (DDDs) to understand medicines given to kids better.
So we built the capability to analyse bed days into many of our charts. Its just a couple of simple checkboxes on the chart.
Potential use cases
Talking to hospital clinicians, we have identified four other potential use cases for up to date and precise bed occupancy data:
Benchmarking data between wards and amongst hospitals, as a basis for sharing and learning.
Supporting antimicrobial stewardship by understanding the true level of usage compared to the patient population.
Admissions and readmissions analysis. Research shows that length of stay and medication errors are risk factors in emergency readmissions.
Analysing length of stay across patient groups has wider implications for understanding and managing patient flow.
We have already built software to address some of the points above. Yet we find little demand for bed days data. Normalisation is used for research projects but not as a routine managmenet tool. I would love to understand why.
Coming from a business background, I would expect that bed occupancy, patient flows, and length of patient stays would be important management information. But I am not a clinician, so maybe I don’t understand.
What am I missing?
Is bed occupancy and patient flow data valuable to you or your team?
What bed days information would you or your team like to see?
Which decisions or actions would better bed occupancy data support?
Maybe you can help. Drop me a reply to let me know what you think or email me direct: kenny@triscribe.net. Or answer the simple questions above using this quick survey link
You can find out more about the bed days analytics and AI Triscribe already offers through this short guide.