It is our pleasure to announce that Dr. Murray Cote, Director, Master of Health Administration Program and Associate Professor from Texas A & M University will be presenting a research seminar titled “Decreasing Environmental Services Response Times” on Monday, April 16, 2012 at 10:00 am in room 189. 

Biosketch 

Murray J. Côté is an Associate Professor and Director of the Master of Health Administration Program in the Department of Health Policy & Management at the Texas A&M Health Science Center in College Station, Texas. Professor Côté earned a B.A. in political science and an M.B.A. from the University of Saskatchewan and a Ph.D. in management science from Texas A&M University. Prior to joining the faculty at the Texas A&M Health Science Center, he was on the faculty at the University of Colorado Denver, the University of Florida, and Trinity University, San Antonio.

Professor Côté's primary research interests are in health care operations, including patient flow, capacity planning and management, demand forecasting, and nurse staffing and scheduling. His research findings have been published in Decision Sciences, the European Journal of Operational Research, Health Care Management Science, and Socio-Economic Planning Sciences, among others. In addition, his research has received awards from the Decision Sciences Institute and the Healthcare Financial Management Association.

Professor Côté has obtained extramural funding from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the National Science Foundation, the Department of Veterans Affairs, and the Education and Research Foundation of the American Production and Inventory Control Society. He has also consulted for a variety of health care organizations including CIGNA, the Texas Transplant Institute at Methodist Specialty and Transplant Hospital, and Shands Jacksonville. Professor Côté recently served as an investigator for a national nursing home pay-for-performance demonstration project funded by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Service and a Department of Veterans Affairs’ project examining the relationship between inpatient census and nurse staffing.

Abstract (Manuscript)

Decreasing Environmental Services Response Times

Improving patient flow in a hospital’s inpatient setting requires a collaborative effort involving numerous multidisciplinary resources. Physicians, access center representatives, hospital nurse managers, inpatient nursing staff, ancillary support staff, patient transporters, and environmental service (EVS) technicians/housekeeping staff must all work together with the patient to provide handoffs of care in a healing environment. Managing bed capacity to create a more efficient utilization of resources can increase patient flow, quicken time to actual care delivery, and improve overall throughput. Reducing the waiting times for patient bed placement is crucial to both patient care and patient satisfaction, and decreasing non-value added times, such as EVS response times to clean dirty inpatient beds, can have a significant impact on inpatient operations and the patient experience. The University of Colorado Hospital created an innovative EVS staffing model by looking at peak inpatient dismissal volumes by each hour of the day and day of the week and capturing the hourly productivity of environmental services staff dedicated to those dismissals. Some staff was converted from full-time status to part-time status to match peak dismissal volumes, which led to a reduction in response times for both ‘Stat’ and ‘Clean Next’ bed requests. The project was kept budget neutral through the development of a more effective schedule and appropriate resource allocation.