A Leading Hospital Transformed Emergency Operations with a Real-Time Visibility Model

The Challenge

When the ED Hits Capacity

In Ohio’s highly competitive healthcare landscape, this hospital center, with a bed count of 225+ and annual visits of 80-100K, built a reputation for delivering exceptional life-saving care for emergency cases. But as the community grew, partly due to the pandemic, bottlenecks began to surface.

Manual, time-consuming registration and triage assessments that had worked previously were no longer sufficient. Boarding time surged. As a result, some patients left without being seen (LWBS). Staff, especially nurses, were frequently experiencing fatigue and burnout.

Despite multiple initiatives such as workflow redesigns and staffing adjustments, overcrowding persisted. Because the issue was never the lack of effort or inadequate staffing to begin with. Instead, there was no visibility into the constraints as they formed. Without it, the leadership team found it challenging to anticipate and respond to the rising footfall. This disrupted care delivery and patient experience.

Business Objectives

What was needed was a more effective approach: real-time visibility into emergency department (ED) operations to streamline triage, discharge, and transfer processes, anticipate footfall, and manage boarding. A model that can facilitate coordination between teams, boost employees’ motivation, and enhance the overall patient experience.

The Solution

Optimizing ED Performance Through Real-Time Visibility

To navigate these challenges without disrupting ongoing clinical workflows, this hospital center collaborated with Damco Solutions to implement a HIPAA-compliant, cloud-based real-time visibility model in its ED, integrating with existing Electronic Medical Records (EMR), on-prem CRM, and databases.

The solution monitors about 59 patient care and resource bottlenecks in real-time, previously hidden, unmanaged, and uncontrolled. This, in turn, is facilitating proactive decision-making across the leadership team, empowering them to identify and address unique ED challenges before they can impact operations, including rising visit volumes, patient complexity, and capacity constraints.

As a result, frontline teams aren’t feeling burdened because they’re assigned duties as needed, helping them provide exceptional care to high-risk, vulnerable patients.

Here is What They Achieved:

• Reduced patient wait times, even during peak hours Real-time visibility improves staff availability in line with demand, enabling faster patient intake and care.
• Identification of the root causes before escalation Teams can anticipate bottlenecks before they creep in, facilitating timely interventions and reducing the number of patients who LWBS.
• Frontline workers are more confident than ever Shared operational awareness fosters trust across the ED, boosting confidence that leadership will provide timely support and direction.
• Enhanced alignment between operations and outcomes Clinical workflows and resource allocation are better coordinated, strengthening staff performance, reducing stress, and improving patient care.

Business Impact

By gaining real-time visibility into ED operations and workflows, the hospital center realized measurable improvements across staffing efficiency, patient throughput, and financial performance. High-value outcomes realized within three months of solution rollout:

• Proactive patient discharge processes free up to 30–35 beds per day, improving capacity during peak hours. This minimizes boarding times and reduces stress on administrators, physicians, nurses, and, especially, families and friends.
• 35% increase in staff productivity and 20% reduction in application processing time across admission and triage workflows. Reduced ED wait times enable nurses to evaluate patients’ conditions more thoroughly, prioritizing those with severe conditions more effectively.
• 26% reduction in patient complaints, driven by improved communication and engagement with them and their families. This translated into higher communication ratings, stronger clinical outcomes, and revenue performance.
• Secure, compliant operations meeting HIPAA and healthcare data privacy requirements, while aligning with internal governance standards.

Client Testimonial

The Bottom Line

ED overcrowding is not a staffing or effort problem. It is a byproduct of limited operational visibility. Through this initiative, the hospital center is now better positioned to:

• Anticipate and manage major ED bottlenecks before they escalate
• Maintain operational efficiency and staff availability during peak demand
• Improve staff morale through smarter scheduling and workload distribution
• Deliver proactive, consistent, and exceptional emergency care
• Reduce revenue leakage from LWBS cases while controlling operational costs