Hospital for Special Surgery first orthopedic hospital to win HIMSS Davies Award

New York City-based Hospital for Special Surgery, the first specialty hospital to win a HIMSS Davies Award for Excellence. has found a way to use teamwork and health IT to improve processes and care outcomes. With nearly 19,000 annual inpatient surgeries, requiring close bed utilization monitoring, HSS leadership used to receive operational reports four times a day using manual data collection, but this posed significant operational challenges, and length of stay adherence was also lacking. To remedy the situation, HSS instituted clinical pathways – procedure-specific, post-op order sets. These pathways established best practices, by coordinating and standardizing care, according to HSS. The pathways are made up of time-based goals and milestones for the interdisciplinary care of defined patient groups, ensuring standardized care across these groups. The pathways also include LOS adherence as part of the performance goals.