WIHI - A Podcast from the Institute for Healthcare Improvement

Date: March 9, 2017 Featuring: Frederick C. Ryckman, MD, Professor of Surgery, Senior Vice President, Medical Operations, Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center (CCHMC) Uma R. Kotagal, MBBS, MSc, Executive Lead, Community and Population Health, CCHMC Pat Rutherford, RN, MS, Vice President, Institute for Healthcare Improvement Making sure patients get the right care, in the right place, at the right time couldn’t be a clearer set of aims. And yet achieving them isn’t so simple, especially at large health systems. It requires a number of underlyi​ng system improvements, including well-designed hospital flow. This has been a focus for health care for the past few decades, often prompted by bottlenecks and overcrowding in emergency departments (EDs). Things are getting better in some places, but there’s definitely a ways to go. IHI’s work on hospital flow dates back to the early 2000s. That’s when we and hospital teams started learning about the ways most hospitals scheduled their operating rooms,