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VA Intra-Hospital Patient Transportation Design Team

The purpose of this Capstone Design Project is to create an improved system for transporting patients from one hospital unit to another for the Veterans Health Administration (VHA). This new process is a paperless system that uses computerized forms to communicate between departments, electronic messages to assign tasks to employees, and automatically-generated control charts to monitor the process. The goal of this project is a new Escort Service system that will decrease response time, reduce the frequency of miscommunication errors, and allow management to monitor and control the department’s performance. An improved process was designed, a computer database was created, and the new system was implemented and studied at the West Roxbury (MA) Campus of the VA Boston Healthcare System. U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs The Need for Project The VHA is looking to create an improved system for transporting patients from one unit of the hospital to another. There is a critical need for process improvement of healthcare systems in the United States. Ineffective systems for medical care create exorbitant costs and avoidable errors that harm patients. The Veterans Health Administration (VHA) is a branch of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) that provides primary care, specialized care, and related medical and social support services to American veterans. For many VHA facilities, the system for transporting patients from one unit of the hospital to another, known as the Escort Service, is filled with inefficiencies and errors. Insufficient processes result in delayed response times, unfilled requests, miscommunications between departments, and low employee morale. An effective Escort Service will have a positive impact on all VHA employees and patients and has the potential for implementation at every VHA hospital across the country. The Design Project Objectives and Requirements The objective of this project is to design an improved process for patient transportation within the hospital. This process involves Nurses requesting Escorts to transport the patient and a Dispatcher assigning these transports to an Escort. Design Objectives The objective of this project is to design an improved process for requesting patient transports and assigning these transports to employees for the VHA. The three objectives of this new Escort Service system are to (1) decrease the response time, (2) reduce the frequency of miscommunication errors, and (3) allow management to monitor and control the department’s performance.