Case Study
Mount Nittany Health Improves Clinical Workflows with Modern Scheduling
Discover how Mount Nittany improved ED throughput and reduced costs by streamlining workflows and improving communication with TigerConnect.
Overview
Mount Nittany Health is a five-star-rated healthcare system located in the heart of Pennsylvania. Originally a community hospital, the organization has expanded to include a medical center, physician group, children’s advocacy center, and foundation. The Mount Nittany Medical Center is a 260-bed acute care facility that is nationally recognized for its excellence in patient safety and quality of care, delivering medical, surgical, diagnostic, and community services. The Mount Nittany Physician Group serves the community with 170 healthcare providers in 30 specialties across 17 locations.
Results at a glance
The Challenge: Lack of Standardization in Communication and Scheduling Systems
Physician scheduling presented a significant challenge at Mount Nittany Health. A detailed analysis of their scheduling workflows revealed communication bottlenecks, discrepancies in schedules, and gaps in coverage.
Each floor of the hospital had its own contact lists for on-call physicians, and every physician group had its own methods and formats of creating and sending schedules to the medical staff office. Any change to the schedule set off a cascade of phone calls and emails to the answering services, emergency department, and certain hospital floors that had their own version of the on-call list.
Although the medical center had a secure messaging system in place, providers were not happy with it and instead relied on pagers, emails, fax, and other communication methods. Sometimes, sensitive patient health information was shared in pager messages that were not HIPAA-compliant. Without a centralized scheduling system, inconsistencies and inaccuracies in on-call schedules and contact information resulted in providers being contacted when not on-call or being contacted by non-preferred methods.
Emergency department hospital admission was another area bogged down by these manual processes. Each hospital admission required the case manager to call multiple doctors to find out who was taking the next admission. They then had to manually create and send a message for each provider, which was time-consuming and inefficient.
“To say we were ignorant of many of the issues that plagued our on-call scheduling system would be an understatement. Chief among these issues was a lack of standardization, which was the cornerstone of a host of other issues.”
— Marissa Wickham, clinical informaticist and educator at Mount Nittany Health.
The Solution: Streamlining Communication & Scheduling with TigerConnect
Mount Nittany Health adopted TigerConnect Clinical Collaboration as its secure messaging system and TigerConnect Physician Scheduling to handle all its physician and on-call scheduling. Their priorities in choosing TigerConnect included its interfacing capabilities, patient communication and alarm management features, Active Directory and multi-organization integration, roles and team functionality, on-call scheduling, and its strong track record with HIPAA-compliant, secure communication.
With TigerConnect, departments can create schedules three months at a time. Using the automated schedule assistant, they can assign an equal amount of on-call time for each provider throughout the year. Assigning roles expedites scheduling and ensures adequate time off. Additionally, any changes in the schedule are automatically reflected in the system in real time.
The implementation of TigerConnect Roles and Teams played a central role in transforming the way Mount Nittany Health handled ED hospital admissions and improved ED throughput. They created a hospital role for each hospitalist group that would handle admissions and consults, and an admission team was created for each group. When a patient needs to be admitted, the case manager simply activates the team message that automatically contacts everyone who needs to be notified.
The Results: Better workflows save time and money
Mount Nittany Health saw immediate success after its transition to TigerConnect. Clinical workflows improved with realistic, transparent, and accurate on-call schedules. By replacing their former multistep, analog scheduling process with a standardized, automated platform, they eliminated time spent maintaining on-call, office, and answering service schedules, saving staff two to four hours a week.
Provider satisfaction improved with the adoption of the new system. Providers were happier because it reduced overhead pages and made it easier to communicate and collaborate with other providers. Because physicians found it easier to communicate using TigerConnect, they were able to eliminate pagers altogether, resulting in $15,000 in annual savings.
Finally, Mount Nittany improved ED throughput by simplifying the admission processes, eliminating three to five calls per admission.
“Although there were financial benefits to switching to TigerConnect Physician Scheduling, we chose it because it was right for our physicians, time-saving for practice managers, provided transparency and success within TigerConnect, and made three scheduling systems into one.”
— Marissa Wickham, clinical informaticist and educator at Mount Nittany Health.
