Making Space for Life Saving Care: How Baptist Health Improved System-Wide Flow and Reduced ED Boarding by 525 Patients a Month

When inpatient flow slows down, it doesn’t just delay one discharge, it backs up the entire system. At Baptist Health Medical Center–North Little Rock, rising ED boarding, long patient placement times, and inconsistent processes across departments were all adding up. But instead of expanding bed capacity, the team took a different path: they redesigned how patients move through the hospital.

This session shares how Baptist Health used AI-powered insights, command-center visibility, and team-driven process redesign to create usable capacity without adding physical space. From reworking discharge steps to tightly aligning support services, their journey shows how operational flow can be transformed from the inside out.

You’ll hear how they used real-time data to anticipate constraints, applied a structured framework (RAPTOR) to accelerate improvement, and empowered teams across levels to take ownership of flow, starting in the ED and extending through every inpatient unit.

Key takeaways:

• Learn how Baptist Health built a centralized command-center model to make real-time capacity visible and actionable across the hospital
  
• See how discharge workflows were simplified, pre-staged, and accelerated to increase early discharges and reduce bottlenecks at peak times
  
• Explore how cross-functional RAPTOR teams helped drive adoption, standardize flow practices, and sustain measurable gains
  
• Understand the operational and cultural changes that led to a 525-patient/month drop in ED boarding, a 40% reduction in POPI times, and the equivalent of 32 new beds, without expanding the facility
  

This is a case study in how structured coordination, clear metrics, and consistent execution can unlock capacity and deliver better care—right now, with the space you already have.