A State of Flow

Hospital flow during the COVID-19 pandemic taught health systems around the country new ways to use quality improve methods to improve efficiency. We learned to how to be more nimble, how not to let perfect be the enemy of good, and how to integrate clinical operations to make the best use of resources.

Building trust with frontline health care staff, learning collaboratively with other health systems, and rapidly using from data and information to drive quality improvement were critical focus areas.

Couple of resources if you are working on tackling this complex but critical issue:

This NEJM Catalyst article summarizes what hospital flow is and why it is important to tackle flow though quality improvement methods. 

This blog post from the Institute for Healthcare Improvement shares some lessons about hospital flow during the pandemic.