SHMG hospitalists took lead to reduce LOS

Patient safety increases, $22 million saved

Thanks to Salem Hospital’s “Hyper-velocity Length of Stay” (LOS) work, we’ve reduced hospital stays without reducing patient care — and saved the health care system $22 million in two years.

As you know, LOS continued rising after the pandemic — in fact, by 1 to 1.5 days, which translated to more than 53,000 additional patient days per year. Our LOS work began in July 2022, with strong commitment from our hospitalists.

Increased LOS can result in patient decline, poor patient outcomes such as falls, medical errors, and increased need for post-hospital placement. Reducing LOS significantly increases patient safety while decreasing healthcare costs for both the patient and organization by freeing up valuable resources. 

The Salem Health Medical Group hospitalist team played an integral role in this work, including:

•  Improving communication with the care team during progression huddles;
• Improving documentation; and
• Evaluating their own practices to improve efficiency.

This amazing work helped us exceed our discharge-to-home metric in May and June! Their engagement and willingness to participate in rapid improvement work to progress patient care and reduce LOS is commendable.

Since the start of this work, Salem Health has reduced LOS by 20% from our peak, exceeding the rest of the state. Our patients are being discharged safely 1.17 days earlier — and we’ve logged more than $22 million in health care savings. 

Our collective work to optimize patient flow throughout our system is a perfect example of our team living the truth that “no patient, employee or provider harm is acceptable to us.”

This average length of stay (ALOS) graph shows that the SHMG hospitalists are discharging patients with a disposition of routine-home under the target of 115% geometric mean length of stay (GMLOS). This is significant because 80% of patients discharge disposition is to home.