Author Interviews, Health Care Systems / 01.09.2015

Dr. Sean Barnes Ph.D. Department of Decision, Operations & Information Technologies Robert H. Smith School of Business University of Maryland, College Park, MD MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Dr. Sean Barnes Ph.D. Department of Decision, Operations & Information Technologies Robert H. Smith School of Business University of Maryland, College Park, MD   Medical Research: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings? Dr. Barnes: Hospitals are continually being challenged to provide timely and efficient care in the face of increasingly constrained resources. One recent approach to help improve patient flow in hospitals is Real-Time Demand and Capacity Management, by which clinicians huddle each morning to predict the number of patients they expect to discharge on a given day (and hence the number of beds that will become available to potentially utilize for newly admitted patients). We proposed a data-driven method for predicting discharges--either on an individual or aggregate basis--and demonstrated that we could match or exceed the predictive accuracy of clinicians. In addition, we showed (with moderate success) that we could use this model to rank patients in order of their expected discharge times, which could be used to prioritize the remaining care tasks for specific subsets of patients. (more…)
Author Interviews, General Medicine, JAMA, Outcomes & Safety / 19.06.2015

Samuel Pannick, MA, MBBS, MRCP Imperial Patient Safety Translational Research Center, National Institute for Health Research and Imperial College London, London, England West Middlesex University Hospital National Health Service Trust, Middlesex, EnglandMedicalResearch.com Interview with: Samuel Pannick, MA, MBBS, MRCP Imperial Patient Safety Translational Research Center, National Institute for Health Research and Imperial College London West Middlesex University Hospital National Health Service Trust Middlesex, England Medical Research: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings? Response: Improving the quality of general medical ward care is a recognized healthcare priority internationally. Ward teams have been encouraged to structure their work more formally, with regular interdisciplinary team meetings and closer daily collaboration with their colleagues. Some early studies suggested that these changes might benefit patients, and help ward teams work more efficiently. However, team interventions on medical wards have been reported with numerous different outcome measures, and prior to this study, it was unclear what their objective benefits were. We showed that there is little agreement on the objective outcomes that best reflect the quality of interdisciplinary team care on general medical wards. Changes to interdisciplinary care aren’t reflected in the outcome measures that researchers choose most often, like early readmission rates or length of stay. Complications of care - although harder to record - might have more promise as a measure of the quality of inpatient team care in these specific medical areas. (more…)