Transforming Emergency Department Operations for Enhanced Military Health Care
In the dynamic world of military health care, the operational efficacy of emergency departments (EDs) often makes the difference between life and death for our service members. Several years ago, Navy EDs were facing substantial operational and clinical challenges that threatened their efficacy, so they called for strategic intervention. The Navy’s Bureau of Medicine and Surgery recognized the need for business process reengineering and standardization. It turned to ReefPoint Group to elevate clinical and business functions across Navy medical treatment facility EDs worldwide.
Our team possesses a deep understanding of military health care environments. Forty percent of us at ReefPoint Group are former service members, including founder and CEO Jeremy Toton. In fact, Jeremy’s personal experience as a patient in the military health care system inspired him to create ReefPoint Group — with the mission to enhance the lives of service members, Veterans, and the clinicians and administrators who help them.
The Challenge
Navy EDs grappled with inefficiencies in patient flow, resource allocation, and overall service quality. ReefPoint Group’s mission was clear: Deploy effective solutions to over 20 Navy medical treatment facilities worldwide to improve critical ED clinical and business functions.
THE SOLUTION
With a commitment to serving those who serve front of mind, ReefPoint Group mobilized a multidisciplinary team comprised of clinicians, health systems engineers, process improvement engineers, and data scientists, to tackle the challenge head-on. We dedicated over 1,000 hours to interviews and observations and reviewed more than 500,000 data points from clinical and business IT systems.
Our data-driven analysis identified critical areas for improvement, from streamlining mouse clicks to refining hospital admissions standard operating procedures. In collaboration with ED executives, staff, and clinicians, we devised and implemented initiatives to redesign systems and engineer new business processes. These initiatives addressed challenges in registration and triage, patient flow, design of patient care teams, ancillary services. They also tackled issues of resource prioritization, allocation, and utilization, including staffing and scheduling.
Key Successes
ReefPoint Group is especially proud of the following efforts:
- Creating a novel ED staffing and scheduling model that is now under consideration for adoption across the entire Military Health System.
- Developing analytic dashboards and custom reporting tools to empower ED leadership and staff to measure, monitor, and sustain performance improvements in previously unmonitored areas. These tools enabled leadership to make informed operational decisions in real time.
- Crafting, delivering, and evaluating enterprise wide, in-person training for ED executives, managers, and staff.
The Impact
The improvements recommended and implemented by ReefPoint Group led to:
The practical impact of our efforts was clear: ED teams were able to serve patients with greater speed and efficacy.
In critical situations, our work contributed to improved health outcomes. These results are a testament to the real-world difference that effective health care solutions can make in the lives of our dedicated service members.
