NASHVILLE, Tenn. (WKRN) — Across the country, hospital emergency departments are being pushed to the brink.

Between a lack of access to primary care, staff shortages and not enough beds, hospitals are being stretched thin, leaving some patients waiting for hours and sometimes days to be seen.

"Our patients are getting older, they're more complex, they come into the emergency department with more acute problems, so more often needing to be admitted," VUMC Associate Chief Medical Officer for Compliance Tyler Barrett said. "Unfortunately, we just have a finite number of beds in the emergency department to see this increasing volume of patients, so health systems like ours choose to come up with an innovative approach to deal with that problem."

Nationwide, 2.5 million emergency department visits left patients waiting for two days or longer, according to 2022 data from the CDC.

It's a picture the Vanderbilt University Medical Center wanted to paint differently, which is why they came up with a new program to ensure they could care for more patients more quickly without compromising support.

"Just giving someone a clinic number when they leave the emergency department and saying just follow up has a much higher rate of those individuals not being able to see that clinician in a timely fashion or running into different barriers," Barrett said. "We want you to come back tomorrow to see this clinic appointment."

The Vanderbilt University Medical Center reported an increase of 8% last year in arrival volumes. In response, the Department of Emergency Medicine and Vanderbilt University Medical Center have developed a post-ED rapid follow-up program for patients who can be referred safely to outpatient clinics for evaluation and treatment. 

In 2023, the first year of the program, 735 patients were referred for rapid outpatient clinic follow-up out of nearly 76,000 emergency department encounters that year.

The program allows patients to enter the emergency department and be triaged as normal, but if their symptoms are not critical or urgent, the hospital is able to offer an appointment within the week. The hospital is calling it "timely outpatient care."

"They left with a specific appointment in place, knowing when and where to be, and that's why we had such a great rate of over 80% of patients making those appointments," Barrett explained.

The most common complaints among patients included chest pain, abdominal pain and shortness of breath.

Due to the success of this program at VUMC, they are looking at expanding the program to other aspects of their hospitals.

News Source : https://www.wkrn.com/news/local-news/nashville/vumc-tracking-success-in-rapid-follow-up-care-program-to-address-long-er-wait-times/