Bed management during a pandemic is crucial, as most hospitals learned during the hit of Covid-19 in 2020. The manual process for bed management and patient flow is inefficient. Hospitals that were still using a manual process when the Covid-19 pandemic hit had an increase of errors and inefficiencies occur which led to bed capacity overload. Manual processes led to:
- Increase in case management meetings to review cases to transfer and discharge
- Increase time spent on phone calls checking on bed availability
- Increased in paper flow which led to miscommunication
- Increase in patient errors because patients placed in wrong bed types
- Poor infection control
- Increased mortality
- Strain on staff led to increasing sick calls and mental exhaustion
BedstatusTM has a clear primary focus of managing patient flow designed to identify and help the specific day-to-day needs of the clinical staff so their time is freed up to continue to provide quality care, reduce their stress, and ultimately improve patient quality outcomes.
Clients who already had BedstatusTM during the Covid-19 pandemic were able to provide best practices on tracking Covid and non-Covid patients and applying specific status codes needed to provide specific care.
Author: Debra Balderrama RN, MSCIS
