Christine Webb, Your Health and Fitness
 

A first in Orlando and the world -- that will help speed up your trip home from the hospital.

Sometimes the time it takes you to leave the hospital when you are a patient takes a while.

What you may not realize is the amount of work that goes on behind the scenes to discharge a patient -- numerous phone calls.

So some doctors at Orlando Health came up with an idea, and it's the industry's first Patient Discharge Solution developed by Nortel.

When a patient is getting ready to be discharged, the doctor notifies the nurse who then makes one call. It automatically notifies everyone from family to the pharmacy to physical therapists.

"The bottom line is if someone is admitted to the emergency room, once they are treated, they leave faster and can get home to their life and their family," said Dr. Wayne Jenkins, the medical director for the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center.

"Nurses spend hours making phone calls, which really cuts down time on the care they give to patients," said Dr. Marc Demers, a surgeon for Orlando Health.

With this new program, nurses spend less time discharging patients and more time treating patients.

In fact, during a recent pilot study at M.D. Anderson Cancer Center Orlando, discharge times improved by four hours.

Faster discharges can mean more patients treated and discharged.

Nortel estimates that a 1,700-bed hospital system can increase annual revenues by as much as $11 million with a conservative increase of 6,000 discharges per year.

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