Case Study: Greenville Health System

Greenville Health System is the largest not-for-profit Healthcare delivery system in South Carolina and operates Greenville Memorial Hospital, a 710-bed tertiary referral hospital.

Greenville Health System (GHS) faced increasing pressure to achieve peak performance and improve patient throughput at its flagship hospital, Greenville Memorial. GHS sought to increase capacity and reduce length of stay by improving patient flow, redesigning discharge planning and utilization review, and optimizing the integrated operational performance of the clinical care team.

Working collaboratively with hospital executives and staff, Huron brought proven processes and tools to optimize clinical operations – decreasing length of stay, improving patient discharge date accuracy, and increasing accountability and communication among leadership and staff.

Optimizing case management

• Improved discharge planning and utilization review processes by instituting interdisciplinary care coordination rounds
• Established clear policies for escalation, EHR referrals and utilization review, ensuring patients received the appropriate level of care - decreasing length of stay and improving patient discharge date accuracy

Improving communication

Communication among clinical departments through interdisciplinary care coordination meetings improved in 19 patient care units. GHS also implemented outlier management meetings to remove discharge barriers for patients with lengths of stay over 20 days. This contributed to more than 350 discharges, accounting for more than 13,000 patient days.

• 109 percent improvement in patient discharge date accuracy
• 193 percent improvement in anticipating a discharge within 24 hours of admission to unit
• 333 percent increase in arranging patient transportation 24 hours prior to discharge
• 650 percent improvement in completing discharge planning assessments within 24 hours of admission

“ Huron expertise, tools and strong implementation process led to improvements in length of stay, interdepartmental communication, and patient discharge that we couldn’t have achieved on our own. Plus, they were very collaborative and worked hard to ensure we could sustain these improvements – and we have,” said Carol Moody, associate chief nursing officer, Greenville Memorial Hospital.