Problem
Patient census in the hospital is dynamic--patients are seen by many different teams throughout their stay, and these interactions can be difficult to track. Time of admission and time of discharge do not tell the entire story. Accurate census data is important in order to staff services appropriately.
Solution
We used "service lists" from our EMR in order to infer when patients were being seen. These service lists are maintained by providers and includes lists of patients for consult teams and primary teams. They are accessible in real time through an API run by our IS Department and an archive of these lists is stored by our Data Science Department. We used these data to trend the number of consults and admissions over time, with no added work or manual entry.
Credit
Visualization and design: David Do
Back end: Eugene Gitelman
Data Science Department: Corey Chivers and others
IS Team