EmergAlert - Hospitals

Linking Community Care with Emergency Departments

Hospitals are under tremendous pressure to reduce wait times, increase efficiencies and improve patient satisfaction. Within their Emergency Departments, hospitals are looking for tools to help reduce and divert unnecessary admissions, minimise the length of stay of the average presenting patient and minimise inpatient admissions.

A lack of communication, to date, with Community Care providers has hampered hospitals in their efforts to identify presenting patients that are already being handled through the Community Care system. Sometimes the patients are old; sometimes they are confused. Whatever the reason, it can take the hospital’s Emergency Department a considerable length of time and effort to establish the facts about the level of care the individual is receiving in the community. This leads to inefficient use of resources, prolonged diagnoses, potential difficulty in monitoring and reconciling the individual’s different prescriptions.

The EmergAlert solution is designed to seamlessly deliver information to the Emergency Department staff, which could include the ED discharge planner, the GEM nurse and the ED managers, so that they can make informed decisions that are best for the individual, the ED and the Community Care providers.

EmergAlert helps reduce Length of Stay (LOS) in Emergency Departments.

The Canadian Triage & Acuity Scale (CTAS) is a tool that enables Emergency Departments (ED) to:

• Prioritize patient care requirements
• Examine patient care processes, workload, and resource requirements relative to case mix and community needs

The CTAS allows ED nurses and physicians to:

• Triage patients according the type and severity of their presenting signs and symptoms
• Ensure that the sickest patients are seen first when ED capacity has been exceeded due to visit rates or reduced access to other services
• Ensure that a patient's need for care is reassessed while in the ED

The CTAS allows ED managers to:

• Measure the case mix (volume and acuity) of patients who visit the ED
• Determine whether the ED has an operational plan and the resources to meet patient needs
• Assess the ED's role within the hospital and health care region

By diverting inappropriate Emergency patients, EmergAlert reduces the overall number of patients allowing faster processing of the remaining patients and thereby reducing overall LOS in the Emergency Department for the higher CTAS levels.