Rehab hospital revamps its admissions process: admissions time dropped by two hours.(Special report: focusing on performance)

Publication: Rehab Continuum Report

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It only took one patient's complaint about the inpatient admissions process for a rehab hospital to make changes that have cut the admissions process by two hours per patient and resulted in a net savings.

"We were saddened to hear the news initially that we weren't doing as well on the admissions process," says Lynae S. Nielsen, MS, CCC, CPCRT, special projects coordinator of Idaho Elks Rehabilitation Hospital in Boise.

"It came from a patient who was disgruntled enough to speak up and tell us what was happening wrong," she says. "Then we studied the process and totally changed the process."

Administrators quickly learned that patients were overwhelmed by how complicated it was to become admitted, Nielsen adds.

"They felt it was too disorganized, that there were too many staff in the room, that they were asked too many questions; there were problems with not getting pain medications on time; and the food arrived cold," she says.

Rehab administrators quickly realized that the problem was that the one-time small rehab hospital's staff had become accustomed to doing everything the same way it always had been done, despite the hospital's growth over the years, Nielsen notes.

"The old ways don't meet new demands," she says. "So the process needs to be renovated."

As a result, the hospital's patient admissions process was reduced from 3.5 hours...

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