Intervening Pre-Admission for Elective Bariatric Surgery

New York-Presbyterian (NYP) strives to ensure that patients are discharged in the safest and timeliest manner possible. When a hospital fails to effectively coordinate discharges, negative outcomes can occur including increases in the length of stay (LOS), costly readmissions, and unsatisfactory patient experiences. The Capstone team’s objective was to identify an elective procedure at NYP with unwarranted variation in LOS between NYP’s campuses and then propose changes to the pre-admission process that could safely decrease LOS. The team conducted a data review and identified significant variation in LOS for elective bariatric surgeries between two campuses of NYP. To determine possible factors for this variation, the team examined the pre-admission processes by conducting site interviews and surveys. As a result, the team identified practices that could be shared to improve the performance of both campuses and recommended using this internal benchmarking process to identify and reduce variations in LOS for other elective procedures at NYP.