Health First, one of Florida’s leading non-profit health systems, Central Florida’s only integrated delivery network, and the only Level II trauma center in their county, is a high-volume health system. Over 1,200 nurses across 4 campuses cover more than 900 beds with 50,000 annual discharges, while 56 operating rooms perform over 22,000 surgeries per year.
4-campus health system
1,200 nurses
900 beds
50,000 annual discharges
With its large footprint and high number of beds, Health First needed to ensure the patient flow process throughout the system was streamlined and that multi-functional teams could sync on the same up-to-date information. These teams, which traditionally operated independently, also needed to streamline collaboration to facilitate new levels of excellence and patient care across the health system.
A key part of addressing this was to convert manual processes to digital ones. With this goal, Health First partnered with LeanTaaS to leverage intelligent workflow automation and change the way they operate overall.
Areas where LeanTaaS' iQueue for Inpatient Flow made an impact at Health First included:
Discharge Management
Using the automated workflows and digital communication capabilities of iQueue for Inpatient Flow, the clinical care teams at Health First were able to streamline the discharge process in multiple ways. Predicted discharge barriers such as missing labs or post-acute care needs helped automatically prioritize patients for discharge, while the elimination of manual processes combined with increased transparency improved collaboration across care teams.
Nurse Staffing
Health First improved collaboration across their health system and improved their staffing practices with iQueue for Inpatient Flow through enterprise transparency, streamlined communication, and proactive planning.
The transparency of real-time visibility to staffing needs, float history, and available resources across the system, combined with AI-driven insights into forecast patient demand, made it possible to ensure appropriate staffing across all units in advance. While real-time communication between unit leaders and the staffing office enabled efficient staffing updates to all nurses.
Capacity Management
Using iQueue for Inpatient Flow’s real-time, AI-enabled situational awareness capabilities, Health First digitally empowered nurses, hospitalists, and various supporting services such as radiology and transport to proactively manage operational performance across the system.
Multiple stakeholders relied on the real-time data and transparency to improve planning within their daily huddles. Nursing leaders proactively planned hospital-level throughput across cross-functional teams while unit leadership supported the coordination and execution of daily activities. At the same time, hospitalist teams set priorities and support services ensured adequate support was available for patients and clinicians across the organization.




Take the first step towards unlocking capacity, generating ROI, and increasing patient access.
If you work in the healthcare industry, or even if you’re just an interested observer, you don’t need a book to tell you that the financial pressure is on as never before. A perfect storm of circumstances is swirling together, one that will make survivability, not to mention profitability, a greater challenge for healthcare companies than we’ve seen in the modern era.
As with banks, retailers, and airlines, which had to rapidly enhance their brick-and-mortar footprints with robust online business models—it is the early movers eager to gain new efficiencies that will thrive and gain market share. The slow-to-move and the inefficient will end up being consolidated into larger health systems seeking to expand their geographical footprints.
Let’s look at just a few of the looming challenges healthcare must meet head-on.
An aging population
By the year 2030, the number of adults sixty-five years of age or older will exceed the number of children eighteen years or younger in the United States. We are living longer than our parents did. Positive news for sure, but problematic for several reasons.
The older we get, the more medical help we need. Older people have more chronic diseases. By 2025, nearly 50 percent of the population will suffer from one or more chronic diseases that will require ongoing medical intervention. This combination of an aging population and an increase in chronic diseases will create a ballooning demand for healthcare services.