Health Systems With Centers Excel in Care Coordination
More than a dozen AI-powered applications run in the background 24/7, and analytics are integrated with the health system’s electronic health record (EHR) to give staff easy access to patient information, including clinical status changes. In an effort to reduce wait times, Mission Control uses clinical AI summaries to determine where in the health system new patients should go.
“It’s not just that a certain patient is the first person we need to place,” Porteous says. “It’s, ‘Which bed is the right bed for them, so the right clinical specialist can provide the right care?’”
In the past, the answers to such questions typically required a clinician to closely review the patient’s chart and then hunt for an appropriate placement. The process was tedious and inefficient, and needed serious reconfiguring.
“Challenges like that are no longer a major problem,” thanks to Mission Control and the technologies that help the facility run, Porteous says. “We’ll still always need clinicians and human oversight to make sure that we’re making the right decisions, but it’s allowing us to work better as an organization and get care to our patients as quickly as possible.”
Montefiore Einstein Has Better Control Over Care Flows
Ensuring that patients get the care they need where and when they need it is also the goal at Montefiore Einstein in New York City. The Bronx-based academic health system launched its command center in 2024 as an always-open, “one-call solution” for easing patient transfers.
The 5,000-square-foot facility in Westchester, N.Y., is a significant upgrade compared with the small quarters that previously served as the organization’s transfer center, says Command Center Director Brittney Cintron-Owens.
“We used to operate with just four or five phone lines, and we’d write everything down on a piece of paper,” she says. “Now, we have TV screens all over the walls, and we can see all of our patient movement in and out of the hospital and across the entire system.”
The facility is staffed with roughly 35 care coordinators from the command center and patient logistics and admitting departments who work with physicians to match patients with the care locations that best fit their needs. This includes patients who are entering Montefiore Einstein for the first time, and those patients who are already in the system and need to move to higher levels of care.
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