St. Mary Medical Center, located in the high desert of Apple Valley, California, is a Level II, 186-bed acute care hospital that treats over 50,000 emergency department (ED) patients annually. It was among the first CEP America sites to implement our Rapid Medical Evaluation® (RME) program. Upon being awarded the St. Mary contract, CEP America conducted an operations assessment to identify any problem areas or issues affecting ED patient flow and services. This led to the formation of a multidisciplinary Triage and ED Efficiency Task Force charged with creating an expedited medical screening process.

• Early results: dramatic improvements

  Six months later, St. Mary had completely reengineered its front-end process and implemented the RME approach. As a result, its ED experienced:

• A 75% decrease in time to provider (TTP)—from 87 to 22 minutes
• An approximately 60% decrease in total turnaround time for discharged patients—from 360 to 143 minutes
• A significant decrease in the percentage of patients who left without being seen (LWBS)—from 10.6% to approximately 1%
• A dramatic increase in patient satisfaction scores—from the 25th percentile in Q1 to the 70th percentile in Q2

• Sustaining success while growing patient volume

  Since implementing the RME program four years ago, St. Mary has maintained its operational and patient satisfaction improvements with a new provider at its triage area to accommodate the growth in patient volume. Its TTP is 24 minutes and the percentage of LWBS patients remains extremely low at 1.5%. Patient satisfaction has continued to improve, with St. Mary ranking third on this metric among CEP America’s high-volume sites. Since implementing the RME program, St. Mary has also achieved vast improvement in diversion hours, slashing times from more than 328 minutes per month to just 26 minutes per month today.