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Evidence of poorly managed patient flow can surface throughout a hospital in scenarios such as:

• Overcrowding and boarding in the emergency department or post-anesthesia care units.
• Bumped or delayed surgeries on the operating room schedule.
• Delays in providing care to patients.
• Overburdened staff and physicians.

Microsoft patient flow solutions use real-time data inputs combined with powerful analytical and statistical software to help you forecast demand for limited resources and to design efficient workflows. Patient flow solutions can be extended in many ways to increase awareness of crucial business information or to collect additional data points about business or clinical processes. When combined with custom business rules to drive alerts and indicators, patient flow solutions help you improve the timeliness of communications and decision-making. With the addition of radio frequency identification (RFID) tags and tracking software, patient flow solutions integrate significant information about the movement, interactions, and locations of patients, staff, or equipment. Implementing a Microsoft patient flow management infrastructure can also help you to:

• Reduce delays and deliver constant system monitoring through the synchronization of workflows across different service stages.
• Understand clinical and triage priorities through data coordination, customized workflows, and visibility into patient flow issues.
• Identify process bottlenecks and recommendations for improvement through the use of statistically validated data.
• Maintain adherence to clinical performance measures by deploying real-time data within process models.

With an improved patient flow management infrastructure, you can simplify demand capacity implementations. Flexible Microsoft technologies work well with existing computer systems and enable you to improve processes, better manage idle capacity, and communicate with staff in downstream and upstream departments, so you can realize benefits almost immediately.

If it's vital to government, it's mission critical to Microsoft.