Admissions monitoring and scheduling to improve work flow in hospitals.

As part of a five-year effort to evaluate alternative methods of improving nurse productivity, this study was undertaken to better understand work flow monitoring as a technique for stabilizing staffing patterns and to improve productivity in hospitals. Two admissions scheduling and monitoring systems were studied and compared with an admissions system without an explicit monitoring function in three medical-surgical units of a 641-bed community hospital. The admissions system based on monitoring case mix was found to be more effective than the system based on monitoring census. Both were significantly more effective than the admissions system without an explicit monitoring function.