ArticlePediatric quality & safety
Quality Improvement Initiative Increasing Early Discharges From an Acute Care Cardiology Unit for Cardiac Surgery and Cardiology Patients-Associated With Reduced Hospital Length of Stay.
Article in Pediatric quality & safety. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 2 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
2 citing papers in PubMed.
- Patient Characteristics Associated with 30-Day Readmission to a Pediatric Cardiac Center.Pediatric cardiology · 2026Article
- A Quality Improvement Initiative to Improve Pediatric Discharge Medication Safety and Efficiency.Pediatric quality & safetyArticle
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
7 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Discharging patients from the acute care setting is complex and requires orchestration of many clinical and technical processes. Focusing on timely discharges improves throughput by off-loading ICUs and coordinating safe outpatient transitions. Our data review demonstrated most discharges occurred later in the day. We sought to improve our discharge times for cardiology and cardiovascular surgery (CVS) patients in our 26-bed inpatient acute care cardiology unit (ACCU). We aimed to increase the number of discharges between 6 am and 12 pm for cardiology and CVS patients on ACCU from 5 to 10 patients per month over 6 months and sustain. Methods: We performed a simplified Failure Mode Effect Analysis on the discharge process and identified improvement opportunities. Our key drivers centered around education, documentation, and planning. Our interventions included: staff education, communication of discharge expectations, daily quality board rounds, hospital-wide collaboration emphasizing conditional discharges, and hospital information technology (IT) improvements. We utilized statistical process control charts to analyze the data. Results: Discharges between 6 am, and 12 pm increased from a baseline of 5 (8%) to 12 (18%) patients per month with a centerline shift. Our process measures demonstrated appropriate conditional discharge usage linked to earlier discharges. Upgrades to our EMR, documentation further increased our timely discharges. Our efforts resulted in a 22% reduction in hospital length of stay from 11.2 to 8.7 days without increased readmission rates suggesting that improved efficiency did not impact care quality. Conclusion: We successfully show how multidisciplinary collaboration and systems-based improvement can increase the number of safe, early discharges.
Identifiers
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.