Why Partner with CEP America?
CEP America provides strong operational performance

Delivering strong operational performance continues to be a challenging requirement across all emergency departments, and it is a continuing focus for CEP America. Our unwavering efforts for ongoing operational improvements are reflected by our successful work in the following areas:

• Patient Flow

  Optimizing patient flow and decreasing time-to-provider (TTP) is a key—and continuing—CEP America initiative. Re-engineering the emergency department requires buy-in from the physicians, nurses, and hospital administrators. We support this process by facilitating the networking of our physicians and nurse managers across all CEP America EDs to showcase to our new sites how concrete and reproducible improvement in patient flow can be achieved through our Rapid Medical Evaluation Program® (RME). RME is not a one-size-fits-all program. Customization by patient volume, as well as by physical plant limitations, and available personnel is essential. A strong relationship between the ED nursing and physician leadership is also necessary to make RME work. Additionally, MedAmerica, (our physician-owned practice management partner) uses in-house Practice Management Consultants to provide another level of management expertise by conducting detailed operations assessments and ongoing site visits across CEP America client sites.

  As of August 2008, the average time to provider for all CEP America emergency departments reached an all-time low of 35 minutes. Please view our case studies for more information.

  At CEP America, we also understand that improving front-end ED flow is not enough. The Institute of Medicine (IOM) and The Joint Commission (TJC, formerly JCAHO) recently recognized that hospital inpatient capacity problems are the primary reason for ED overcrowding. Many CEP America physician leaders are already working with their hospitals and medical staffs to address inpatient length-of-stay, hospital capacity management, and movement of patients from the ED to inpatient wards. Our goal is to use our patient flow management expertise and our experience leading multi-disciplinary hospital improvement to help our hospital partners address patient flow throughout the hospital.

• Data for Performance Improvement

  CEP America’s proprietary data warehouse system, the MedAmerica Analysis and Reporting System (MARS), provides easy access to data that is used as a management tool to monitor and improve performance. Through MARS, we can compare any element for which data has been collected, including physician profiling, clinical costs and outcomes, and capabilities to aid in improving the quality and delivery of care. With appropriate data sources, MARS can deliver detailed reports tailored to the needs of physicians, nurses, and administrators on innumerable aspects and measurable metrics of the practice—from patient satisfaction and length of stay by patient or per individual physician, to length of stay by discharge status, day of the week, and diagnosis, to CT scans by diagnosis by physician. MARS has also been used by the state of California for early detection and monitoring of the annual flu season. CEP America also links all emergency departments and physician Partners to extensive management resources through our proprietary intranet and website. For instance, our ED Calculator provides value to both hospital administrators and the ED medical director by showing the relationship between improvements in ED operational metrics and hospital revenue. By entering your hospital's data, this tool can approximate increased annual revenue that may be attained through efficient ED operations. (The ED Calculator can also be seen, courtesy of CEP America, at the Studer Group® website.) We also share best practices developed throughout our national network of over 60 emergency departments.

• Support for Specialized Patient Throughput

  We have developed a number of programs and services to support the management of targeted patient populations within the emergency department to address specialized patient, medical staff, and client hospital needs. Through our practice support partner, MedAmerica, we offer Hospitalist and On Call Panel solutions to further enhance patient throughput and optimize consultations for any aspect of ED operations.