Emergency room system going into effect expected to increas profitability
By Don Stacom
Hartford Courant (Connecticut)
Copyright 2007 The Hartford Courant Company
All Rights Reserved
BRISTOL, Conn. — People arriving at Bristol Hospital’s emergency department today will encounter a new system designed to cut their waiting time.
The hospital is opening a six-bed unit for people with sprains, sore throats and relatively minor ailments, freeing up the main 16-bed section for more serious cases.
It’s the first step toward a multi-year expansion of the emergency services unit, an improvement that President Kurt Barwis said is key to bringing the community hospital back to profitability.
Workers this winter remodeled space to create an 1,800-square-foot Express Care Unit that’s intended solely for patients with the least critical problems. A physician or physician’s assistant along with a nurse and emergency medical technician will serve those patients. Separating that group from patients with more serious injuries or symptoms will lead to quicker care for everyone, according to Dr. Larry Levine, chief of emergency medicine at the hospital
“We want to see patients as soon as possible. I hear about three-, four- and six-hour waits at some city hospitals, and I think that’s intolerable. As a community hospital, we ideally want to be within 30 minutes -- and of course for people who are very ill or injured, we see them immediately,” Levine said.
“The main thing we’ve done is to add new beds. Our department was built many decades ago and designed for maybe 20,000 patient visits a year, but we see about 39,000 a year now,” Levine said. “We have the staffing to be in the 45,000 to 50,000 range, but we can’t with the physical plant we have.”
Barwis said contractors and the hospital’s staff managed to shave weeks off the construction schedule, bringing the project in below its $800,000 budget. The state is providing $1.2 million for the work and for a computerized tracking system to monitor patients through each stage of their emergency department care. That system will show where delays are occurring, Barwis said.
Bristol Hospital is studying how it can replace the entire emergency department over the next two years or so to further expand capacity, with a minimum of 30 beds. When Barwis took the top executive spot at the nonprofit hospital last year, he emphasized that revenue could be increased by enlarging that department. The hospital has lost millions of dollars over the past three years, putting it under pressure to raise income.
“We’ve lost market share over the past few years because of capacity, and we can get it back. We have the quality care,” Barwis said.
In recent years the emergency unit has implemented a variety of modern techniques, including bedside registration, as a way to get patients into treatment rooms quicker. Clerical interviews about insurance coverage and other paperwork are done there instead of in the lobby.
Also, nurses who specialize in emergency medicine are authorized to order some basic tests or x-rays when the patient is first brought into a treatment room, so the results are often available when the physician arrives.