stattransfers

Thank you for the information about the BC Bedline. A universal system to arrange transfers and transports would be awesome. I just wrote down some of my frustrations after reading some recent studies that provided some empirical evidence behind my angry musings!! Strokes - from this study "The median distance from the transferring hospital was 14.7 miles, and 91% of the patients were transported by ambulance. The median transfer time was 104 minutes, and the median time from symptom onset to arrival was 296 minutes" Cardiac - "found that only 11 percent of patients left the referral hospital within the recommended 30 minutes. In fact, more than one-third of patients waited more than 90 minutes."

1) It is a phone based system. I have to call the admitting department. The admissions person makes phone calls to find a receiving doctor. The admissions person has to call to find a nurse and a bed. There is no integrity of the patient report with so many phone calls. 2) I have to call hospitals one at a time. I never buy anything without comparing 10 website and reading tons of customer reviews. I should be able to screen multiple hospitals at once. 3) Each receiving hospital has a different admissions process. Sometimes I talk to another nurse. Sometimes I talk to a secretary. Sometimes they want a face sheet and other times they want a sheave of paperwork. 4) I can't call the transport company until a bed is secured. In Sept 2011, the AHA Journal Circulation published a study "Causes of Delay and Associated Mortality in Patients Transferred With ST-Segment-Elevation Myocardial Infarction" that showed 26.4% of all transfer delays were caused by "awaiting transportation" 5) EMTALA has no time restrictions. It has been common knowledge that transferring patients take a long time. Two studies last year proved that it takes way too long. One study showed that mortality doubles in heart attack patients that wait longer than 30 minutes to be transferred - less than 12% of transfers met this goal. A stroke study found a median transfer time of 104 minutes in spite of a median distance of 14.7 miles!!