VIDALIA, GA – Do process management approaches that work in other industries have an impact in a healthcare environment?

Meadows Regional Medical Center has become a believer. Making use of an innovative program from the Enterprise Innovation Institute of Georgia Tech, the rural hospital achieved gains in efficiency and savings in its emergency department.

By reducing wasted time and working together to cut out unneeded steps, the hospital was able to achieve a 44 percent reduction in average length of stay per ED patient, see 10 percent more patients and see patient satisfaction scores rise to 92 percent.

Improvements in handling emergency patients is important to the facility, which accepts critically ill patients from five smaller critical access hospitals, said Frank Mewborn, project manager for the Enterprise Innovation Institute.

The project at Meadows Regional was funded by a grant from the Georgia Rural Economic Development Center.

The initiative was one of the first for the Georgia Tech affiliate, which traditionally has helped entrepreneurs, economic developers and communities improve their competitiveness by applying science, technology and innovation.

Mewborn said the institute worked with the facility in June 2005 over the course of a week to conduct training, then worked with staff to do an assessment of the flow of patients in the emergency department. The cross-functional hospital team found 70 to 80 areas of improvement and developed 44 action items to reduce the time needed to admit, treat and discharge non-critical patients.

As part of the improvement, ED staff took steps to better organize and manage the workspace and increased the use of standardized methods for communicating and queuing patients.

ED staff now feel more empowered to look for areas for improvement, and that will be important as officials consider building a state-of-the-art hospital to replace the current facility, built in 1963, said Alan Kent, CEO and president of Meadows Regional.

“If you don’t change and innovate, it will kill you,” he said.

Solutions to the ED’s problems “were almost too simple,” Mewborn said. “In general, hospitals try to make things more complicated.”

“Treating a patient is more complicated than producing a widget on an assembly line,” he added. “On most improvement projects, healthcare providers spend so much energy framing the problem that they never get around to improving it. Lean is a very simple approach – the philosophy is to have a lot of small improvements. Eventually, they add up to large improvements.”