Newswise — WASHINGTON (Oct. 30, 2017) — Urgent Matters, Philips Blue Jay Consulting, and Schumacher Clinical Partners are pleased to announce the winners of the 2017 Emergency Care Innovation of the Year Award, a competition to foster innovation in emergency departments nationwide.

The Emergency Care Innovation of the Year Award provides an opportunity for multi-disciplinary teams to be acknowledged for cutting-edge innovations in emergency care. The award, now in its fifth year, provides a platform for sharing effective solutions that address common issues facing the emergency care community.

Innovations, or tools, were reviewed by a committee comprised of representatives from Urgent Matters, Philips Blue Jay Consulting, Schumacher Clinical Partners, and the Urgent Matters Editorial Board. The top rated tools were assessed based on their novelty, exportability, effectiveness, clarity, and on their ability to be used by a multi-disciplinary health care team.

Congratulations to ED Telehealth Express Care Service, submitted by New York-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center, on being selected as the winner of the 2017 Emergency Care Innovation of the Year Award.

The ED Telehealth Express Care Service uses telemedicine to rapidly evaluate patients who seek care at emergency departments. Traditional in-person Urgent Care and low acuity emergency department visits can take as long as two or three hours, while the 3,000 ED Telehealth Express Care visits were reduced to an average time of 39-minutes. These visits are performed collaboratively by an advanced practice provider and a telehealth physician. This innovative workflow led to a dramatic decrease in length of stay in conjunction with a high degree of safety and patient satisfaction.

Honorable mentions include:

  • Acute Care at Home - West Health & UC San Diego Department of Emergency Medicine

The clinical team for Acute Care at Home developed home-based care order sets, process flow maps, and supportive infrastructure, which allows the emergency physician to provide a warm hand-off from the emergency department to the home health provider and primary care physicians for medical oversight.

  • ED Antimicrobial Stewardship - UC Davis Health Department of Emergency Medicine

The ED Antimicrobial Stewardship intervention reduced antibiotic duration and improved guideline adherence by using a physician champion, an electronic order set based on 2014 IDSA guidelines, and by disseminating an emergency department specific wound isolate antibiogram, as well as utilized peer-comparisons and individual audit and feedback.

  • Timely Provider Shift Report - Edward Elmhurst Health

This innovation was an e-survey system sharing timely shift feedback with providers regarding performance metrics and patient wellbeing or service issues. Timely provider shift feedback resulted in insights on practice corrections and improved patient safety and experience.

All submitted tools that met entry criteria will be posted to the Urgent Matters online searchable toolkit, a collection of strategies and tools developed by hospitals across the country to target specific issues facing hospital emergency departments. The toolkit is available at https://smhs.gwu.edu/urgentmatters/toolkit.

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About Urgent Matters
Urgent Matters is a national initiative dedicated to finding, developing and delivering strategies to improve patient flow and reduce emergency department crowding. Urgent Matters has a long-standing reputation for producing unbiased content from a multi‐disciplinary perspective. Through educational activities such as e-newsletters, webinars podcasts, online tools, and conferences, Urgent Matters disseminates best practices for emergency care. Urgent Matters is managed by the Center for Healthcare Innovation and Policy Research at the George Washington University School of Medicine and Health Sciences. For more information, visit https://smhs.gwu.edu/urgentmatters/

About Philips Blue Jay Consulting
Philips Blue Jay Consulting is comprised of nationally-recognized emergency care experts who implement effective, meaningful, and lasting changes to optimize service and patient throughput in hospital emergency departments. The team creates outcome-oriented solutions and achieves quantifiable results through process improvement services and enhanced interim leadership. Philips Blue Jay Consulting collaborates with hospitals and health care systems to improve overall performance in the ED. For further information, please visit www.philips.com/healthcareconsulting

About Schumacher Clinical Partners
Schumacher Clinical Partners is a privately held, physician-driven company dedicated to helping hospitals and providers focus on delivering high-quality patient care. As one of the nation’s largest and fastest growing health care organizations, SCP partners with more than 7,000 providers to help care for 8 million+ patients annually with innovative, patient-centered solutions covering the entire continuum of care, including emergency medicine, hospital medicine, wellness programs, and consulting services. For more information, visit http://www.schumacherclinical.com/