​​​​​​​​​To deliver high standards of safe, person-centered care, it is critical to provide the right care, in the right place, at the right time. The Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI) understands the vexing problems and the effective solutions needed to make substantial improvement in patient flow throughout the hospital. 

IHI's five-day Hospital Flow Professional Development Program guides teams through an in-depth examination of high-leverage strategies to improve hospital flow. Working closely with expert faculty and hospital leaders who have achieved exemplary patient flow outcomes, participants develop or refine customized action plans to address their own organizations' unique opportunities for improvement. ​​​​​​​​​

The High Stakes of Suboptimal Flow 

​Optimizing patient flow throughout the hospital is essential to ensuring safe, high-quality, patient-centered care. Providing timely access to appropriate care and optimizing hospital flow are both critical levers to increasing value for patients, clinicians, and health care systems. ​

Poorly managed flow has critical implications, such as: 

• Delaying treatments 
• Failing to provide the right care, in the right place, at the right time 
• Putting patients at risk for potential harm and less than optimal care
• Increasing the burden on clinicians and accelerateing burnout

Many recognize that diversions, long waits, and delays in the emergency department (ED) are a hospital-wide issue, not solely an ED issue. Waits are often the result of ED beds being occupied by patients waiting for admission to the hospital. Lack of inpatient capacity also results in patients being “boarded” in the post-anesthesia care unit (PACU) and often managed on “off service” units.

Yet, while many understand the problem, they don’t often have the strategies needed to address hospital-wide patient flow.​​​​​​