AI Partnership to Improve Pediatric Hospital Operations, Care Coordination

Children's Mercy Kansas City and GE HealthCare have launched the Patient Progression Hub – a hospital operations center designed to leverage artificial intelligence (AI), predictive analytics, and real-time data to enhance care progression and coordination. 

Children’s Mercy will use the technology to forecast patient demand, improve care access, streamline patient flow, address staffing needs, and optimize discharge planning, according to the press release.  

The Patient Progression Hub serves as a “command center” to help Children’s Mercy coordinate daily patient care using a video wall with customized analytics tiles to support the monitoring and management of patient flow throughout the health system. Using AI, the hub can identify potential issues and alert care teams before such problems arise. 

Some of the improvements the health system has been able to enact since the hub’s deployment include: managing and centralizing bed placement, which improves bed assignment workflows and prioritizes timely bed placement and transfers; addressing potential delays, such as how long patients wait in the emergency department before being assigned an inpatient bed; improving staffing through AI-based predictions of patient census and demand levels up to 48 hours in advance; and streamlining the discharge process by using real-time data and predictive analytics to track patient journeys. 

"Prior to implementation, the organization relied on manual processes and often retrospective data to understand patient census and anticipate discharges," explained Jodi Coombs, RN, executive vice president and chief operating officer, Children's Mercy, in the press release. 

"Now we have visibility into operations across the entire system to make faster and smarter complex decisions as soon as vital workflows change,” she said. “The Patient Progression Hub journey enables endless possibilities for using real-time data to drive actions that deliver excellent patient care and supports our team members." 

The press release states that team members are co-located within the hub’s space to bolster communication and collaboration, tear down barriers to care, and improve patient and employee satisfaction. 

"Most patients and families won't even know the command center exists, but they will significantly feel the impact – less waiting around for a bed and getting discharged quicker so they can go home that much sooner," said Robert Lane, MD, executive vice president and physician-in-chief at Children’s Mercy. "Making better informed decisions leads to better outcomes for our patients, families and our staff." 

Other health systems are also using real-time analytics and other advanced technologies to support pediatric care. 

In an interview with HealthITAnalytics in October, Santiago Borasino, MD, medical director of the cardiovascular intensive care unit at Children’s of Alabama, discussed how the health system is tackling patient deterioration, addressing extubation readiness, and leveraging code event reviews using real-time analytics in its cardiovascular ICU as part of its ICU Liberation strategy.