Valley Children’s Healthcare & Hospital

Background
The Valley Children’s Hospital (formerly known as the Children’s Hospital of Central California) is a state-of-the-art, non-profit facility on a 50 acre campus with a medical staff of more than 525 physicians. With 348 beds, they are the second largest children’s hospital in California, and the 10th largest hospital of its kind in the United States. Valley Children’s Hospital provides comprehensive, high-quality healthcare exclusively for children, from before birth and all through young adulthood, including performing more than 11,000 pediatric surgeries a year.

“Savance is definitely the kind of company that we enjoy working with from sales, to project management, to support and service. They [are] obviously used to navigating the bureaucracy that comes with a hospital.”

Challenges
Before finding Savance Health, Valley Children’s Hospital was experiencing long wait times and a less than satisfactory patient registration process. They also wanted to improve their hand off communication from one area to another within the department. Donna Yoshida, Operations Manager at Valley Children’s Hospital explains: “Our initial need was for a patient check-in kiosk, but quickly grew into a full patient tracking system, once we saw the potential of the [Savance] system”.

Solution
Savance helped Valley Children’s Hospital design the patient check-in kiosks so that they were customized both for the hospital as a whole, as well as for each department. They also implemented touchscreen computers equipped with Savance’s software for each check-in station, and later added privacy filters for additional patient confidentiality. The check-in process now works in tandem with Savance’s Patient Tracking & Flow solution. “The patient tracking system tracks patient flow from the time the patient arrived in the department through the various stages of the exam to completion,” Yoshida explains, and continues: “Savance helped us design the check-in stations so that we asked the patients the right questions that pre-populated information in Savance’s tracking system”, Yoshida says. “The implementation was extremely smooth.”

The success quickly spread to other areas of the hospital, such as the orthopedic and oncology clinics. “Currently, we are working to implement a patient / family tracker in the Imaging lobby to inform waiting families of the procedure status of their child.”

“[Savance has] been very supportive with response times the same day, usually within hours, regardless of the priority. They always scheduled our customizations and stuck to a timeline keeping us informed of their progress along the way.”

The next big initiative was proposed through a lean project, taking the system beyond just patient tracking, to recognizing bottlenecks in the hospital’s workflow process. Yoshida explains: “We started in the orthopedic clinic classifying and evaluating each step in the process from patient check-in, to registration, to consult, to provider, all the way through to completing the visit. The data captured helped us identify a baseline for our current level of care – for the entire department, per provider and per type of visit.”

Results
The information gathered through the Savance Health system enabled Valley Children’s Hospital to pinpoint bottlenecks, make appropriate changes, and then make improvements based on those changes. “We were able to cut wait times by an average of 15 minutes, improve the registration time by 4 minutes, and reduce the overall visit by 20 minutes on average. We saw an instant improvement in patient satisfaction and a marked improvement in our overall communications,” Yoshida says. “We currently have plans to continue expanding to additional ambulatory clinics, are proposing to implement Savance’s ID scanning and real-time tracking system (universal, hospital-wide tracking) incorporating inpatients and emergency room patients to our patient tracker next year depending on budget approvals.”

Overall, Valley Children’s Hospital is very satisfied with their relationship with Savance Health. Donna Yoshida says: “Savance is definitely the kind of company that we enjoy working with, from sales, to project management, to support and service. They assigned us a project manager and a sales representative right from the start, and took charge to forge ahead – obviously used to navigating the bureaucracy that comes with a hospital. Their guidance and expertise has been invaluable to help us implement the best solution tailored to each department’s needs. They listened to our requests and answered with great solutions. They have been very supportive with response times the same day, usually within hours, regardless of the priority. They always scheduled our customizations and stuck to a timeline keeping us informed of their progress along the way.” She concludes: “I’d wholeheartedly recommend Savance to anyone looking to work with a great company to deliver a software and hardware solution for the healthcare industry. Their ability to listen, suggest, and deliver is what sets them apart from other vendors.”