Transfer Delay

More Info

• Transfer Delay is reported as one of the following Indicators, see those pages for how specifically it is used there.
  • Transfer Delay (Critical Care)
  • Transfer Delay (Medicine)

• Transfer Delay
  • starts at the Transfer Ready DtTm corresponding to the first Boarding Loc of a given Level of care
  • ends as a patient leaves that level of care in one of the following ways:
    • to a Dispo location (ie Dispo DtTm)
    • to a Boarding Loc with a different level of care (ie the start of that next Boarding Loc)

Specifically:

• if the new Boarding Loc has a higher Level of care the clock re-starts as well
• when a patient transfers between locations at the SAME Level of Care (e.g. Ward1 --> Ward2 or ICU1-->ICU2) if the patient had a Transfer Ready DtTm in the first of these locations (Ward1 or ICU1 in the examples) then the total Transfer Delay at that Level includes the time in the 1st location after the Transfer Ready DtTm + ALL the time in the 2nd location (and subsequent) at the same Level of care
• so a single patient, during hospitalization who goes: {Ward --> ICU --> Ward --> ICU} could have Transfer Delays associated with EACH of the 4 locations
• transferring to a lower or higher Level of Care resets the Transfer-Ready clock, but transfer to another location at the same Level of Care does not reset that clock

Some Explanations/Rationale

• The main purpose of tracking Transfer Delays is for administrators to estimate bed needs:
  • e.g: Delays in transfers out of ICU generally are, in a sense "wasted ICU bed-days", and the cumulative number of ICU days patients spend waiting to leave ICU may indicate both inadequate ward beds AND a possible ability to reduce the number of ICU beds if it were possible to promptly send ICU patients out as soon as they are clinically ready
• Regarding a patient deemed Transfer-Ready to a lower Level of Care but who before such transfer gets sicker and remains in their current location/level
  • These days are INCLUDED in the wasted bed-days at the current Level of Care -- while it might seem like those days after the decision to "cancel" the transfer to a lower Level should not be counted as "wasted" at the current Level, the reason we include them is that we never know what would have happened if the patient had indeed gone to the lower Level promptly, and it is possible that she/he would not have gotten sicker if the transfer had occurred promptly

A related concept is ER Delay. It is not captured by Transfer delay because we consider the ER the same Level of care as the regular level of care of the service taking care of a patient.