What happens when more than 65 people collaborate in one room for intensive, weeklong brainstorming sessions? A plethora of creative solutions to optimize the delivery of care to critically ill patients.
Last month, Texas Children’s Business Process Transformation Department organized Blitz Week to develop an alternative stacking solution and identify design requirements for the 19-floor expansion of Pediatric Tower E next to Texas Children’s Pavilion for Women.
The 25-floor tower, which is slated for completion in 2018, will house a 130-bed intensive care unit, new operating rooms with the latest technology, and the Heart Center, which includes the cardiovascular operating rooms and the cardiovascular intensive care units. The roof of the tower will feature a helipad to transport critically ill patients to Texas Children’s.
To ensure that functionality drives the design of the new pediatric tower, an Interdisciplinary Work Group was formed comprised of key players representing different specialty areas of the hospital including clinical care, pharmacy, radiology, anesthesiology, surgery, family patient services, emergency center, blood bank, supply chain and the Heart Center.
Prior to Blitz Week, the group assembled into specialized teams to map out how they would respond to seven complex patient care scenarios. The teams reconvened during Blitz Week to share their current work flow process using a spaghetti diagram and compared it to the initial stacking diagram to determine what design changes need to be made to enhance operational efficiency and overall patient experience in the new pediatric tower.
“Putting all key players in the same room at the same time was powerful,” said Melanie Lowther, director of Business Process Transformation at Texas Children’s. “After spending more than 35 hours with bedside and support staff, and reviewing more than 150 workflows in one week, we generated creative solutions and requirements to help architects develop a better and more functional schematic design.”
The Super User Committee endorsed these recommendations from Blitz Week:
- Implement an internal transport team to safely shuttle patients between floors in the pediatric tower
- Reshuffle the Heart Center for better adjacencies by having cardiovascular operating rooms and cardiovascular intensive care units located on the same floor, and construct a separate MRI in the Heart Center.
- Separate outpatient and inpatient radiology for all modalities to optimize patient care work flow processes
- Build call rooms to be co-located with each service area instead of grouped in one location
- Revise stack diagram to include Critical Care Medicine offices
During the initial design development process, the Interdisciplinary Work Group and Texas Children’s Simulation Center engaged in table-top simulated scenarios to prepare for potential emergency management situations.
Lowther says once the architects create the initial schematic design, the simulation team will develop a cardboard mockup to represent a small size version of different areas of the pediatric tower. The cardboard simulation will allow staff to test out processes, see how departments will be set up and catch potential design issues before the real construction begins.
“Blitz Week was an incredible success and helped us eliminate redundancies in our work flow processes to ensure we deliver the most efficient care to our critical care patients,” said Dr. Stephen Stayer, Texas Children’s associate chief of Anesthesiology. “We want to continue to make Texas Children’s the best possible place to give and receive care and this is one example of how we are fulfilling our CareFirst promise.”