Veronica is a nurse at a licensed memorial hospital by the name of Dosher. She has been ordered to determine the rate of admission, discharge, and transfer of patients at the facility. The questions that need to be answered are as follows: What uses might hospital administrators have for this information? What do these measures indicate about the operation of this hospital? Where might Veronica find this information?
The admission, discharge, and transfer rates, or ADT, contain vital information for the hospital administrators. The data of coordination and workflow of patients is essential to a well-functioning environment (Birch, 2020). For the hospital administrators, this means that the data on the patients is readily available and can be used for a variety of purposes (“Admission, Discharge, Transfer Notifications (ADT) Use Case,” n.d.). For example, it can be used to predict readmissions (Saha, Sircar & Bose, 2021), or to regulate follow-ups (Birch, 2020). Furthermore, this data provides a clearer view for the administrators on the operations of the hospital.
These measures indicate a number of things, including the workflow of the hospital. ADT rates correspond with the productivity levels of the hospital (Birch, 2020), since they show the flow of patients in and out of the hospital. If there is a significantly larger number of patients being admitted than being released, this might be flagged from the data. Then, the issues can be addressed, whether they have to do with understaffing or lack of facilities.
Assuming that there is no ADT digital system in the hospital, Veronica would have to manually collect all information. Then, she would have to gain access to the patient records from the hospital, and sort them accordingly. Even assuming that the hospital records are well-kept, she might encounter difficulties with patients without insurance or undocumented ones. By law nurses only have access to the medical files of their patients, but it would still be possible to gauge general numbers without breaching privacy.
References
Admission, Discharge, Transfer Notifications (ADT) Use Case. (n.d.). Michigan Health Information Network Shared Services. Web.
Birch, R. (2020). Admission-discharge-transfer (ADT) systems. Talking HealthTech. Web.
Saha, P., Sircar, R. & Bose, A. (2021). Using hospital Admission, Discharge & Transfer (ADT) data for predicting readmissions. Machine Learning with Applications, 5(15), 1-9.