Adventist Health Uses Capacity Management Tech to Navigate COVID-19

The Cerner technology has helped decrease patient transfers to other locations and reduce average transfer time. It also helps track COVID-19 metrics for individual facilities across the health system. Adventist Health is a large, multi-hospital health system with acute facilities located across three states. With the onset of COVID-19, Adventist Health, like most healthcare organizations, set up a central crisis command center to manage the response to the disaster.

One of the positive results of the project was a decrease in patient transfers to other facilities. “In the past, transferring a patient was a very manual process and involved a lot of coordination from the provider to contact another provider, [a] nurse supervisor to nurse call, arranging transportation,” Zanone explained. “Also, in the past, you could not see who had capacity. It was necessary at times to call multiple facilities to find one with capacity.”

As a fortunate consequence, a system process was developed that encompassed who was on call at each facility for transfer and transportation contracts, enabling the quick movement of patients. Average transfer went down from 6-8 hours to 2 hours.