February 23, 2016 – Airports and Hospitals

Podcast: Download (Duration: 1:07 — 1.5MB)

Subscribe: RSS

Anchor lead:  When is a hospital like an airport? Elizabeth Tracey reports

Think of the last movie you saw that featured an airport control tower.  Lots of computer monitors tracking every single airplane within miles, all with an eye toward efficiency and safety.  That’s exactly what’s happening at Johns Hopkins Hospital, where a new system called Command Center has just been deployed to track patients.  Gabe Kelen, director of emergency medicine, explains.

Kelen: Command Center is one of the most exciting new developments in patient flow.  The Command center is much like a FEMA type of dashboard with 20 some odd different feeds of information of patient flow all throughout a monstrously large institution like ours.  Simultaneously you can know the status of pretty much every patient in every bed in the institution.   :27

Kelen says the hope is to ease crowding and improve patient experiences, something else that will be closely tracked.  At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.