Hospital Capacity Management Consortium joins the AHA
Space, time, supplies, equipment and front-line staff are finite resources, and probably no single event in recent history made that truth clearer than the COVID-19 pandemic. The global infectious disease crisis highlighted the importance of being able to optimize every inch of a health care operation without sacrificing staff and patient safety.
Relatedly, the pandemic helped to elevate one of the key tools in accomplishing that optimization: capacity management professionals.
In 2020, James J. Scheulen, PA-C, MBA, chief administrative officer of emergency medicine and capacity management at Johns Hopkins Medicine in Baltimore; Vikas Parekh, M.D., associate chief medical officer of capacity and operations in the office of clinical affairs at Michigan Medicine in Ann Arbor; and Robert Fogerty, M.D., MPH, senior medical director of clinical leadership at Yale New Haven (Conn.) Hospital, created the Hospital Capacity Management Consortium (HCMC), a new group where like-minded professionals could freely share practices, policies, technology and other resources, allowing each member to learn from and improve upon the knowledge being exchanged. And in 2024, HCMC joined the American Hospital Association (AHA) as its newest Professional Membership Group (PMG).
“During the pandemic, the group was all about how to care for this influx of patients with a very specific disease while maintaining operations the best that we could with the resources we had,” says HCMC Advisory Board President Heidi High, who is executive director of capacity management at Cedars Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. High has been involved with HCMC since its earliest days.
“As we moved out of the pandemic, it evolved more into conversations that also were important pre-pandemic. But it elevated the conversation and really connected the dots for many health care leaders. Yes, staffing is important because you need a nurse to care for those patients, but you also need all the support services departments that wrap around a patient to progress their care toward discharge,” says High. “Whether you work in environmental services (EVS), central transport, imaging, pharmacy, procedure areas or acute care therapy, nearly every department in a hospital plays a role in capacity management. It all connects, and now we have this group that not only has industry knowledge but now also has a platform.”
Capacity management professionals work at all angles of a health care operation. For instance, during the pandemic, High says she worked closely with the facilities management team to find space that could be converted for patient care. In a single day, capacity management leaders are communicating with staff from every department and at every level, from front-line EVS and clinical staff to executive leadership and board members, all with a mission to streamline and optimize available resources for timely and effective patient care.
Nerissa Legge, HCMC executive director, says the profession’s mission was a perfect fit with the AHA. “What HCMC members focus on and do really aligns with the AHA’s values and with our other PMGs,” Legge says. “It’s around ensuring patients are receiving the best care at the best time and in the right place.”
Although capacity management professionals have a wide reach across a health care organization, High says that in many ways the field is still in its early development phase, precipitating the need for continued education and the creation of industry standards and benchmarks.
HCMC holds two yearly symposiums that are currently free to members and non-members. The spring gathering was hosted virtually on April 29 with more than 400 attendees, and speakers presented on topics such as aligning transfer center investments with the long-term goals of a health care organization, case studies on command center design, and strategies to reduce patients’ length of stay and readmissions with defined care paths. The next virtual symposium is scheduled for Oct. 22.
Members of HCMC also will be presenting at the AHA Leadership Summit in Nashville, Tenn., July 20-22. Four speakers will lead a Monday session titled “The Capacity Management Playbook: Proven Strategies to Unlock Access, Drive Growth and Achieve Financial Success” (access leadershipsummit.aha.org for more).
Other projects in the works include a new publication on patient hallway boarding, which will share results of a survey conducted by HCMC’s research committee, and an introductory curriculum on capacity management leadership. Legge says the consortium, which at press time sits at nearly 100 members, also is starting a blog with articles written by members for members.
“We definitely want to see the membership continue to climb,” Legge says. “Right now, our growth has happened a lot by word of mouth.”
Legge says HCMC has built a solid infrastructure with its new website, membership profiles and benefits, and a virtual member network and discussion board. Now, it’s gearing up for a membership campaign to continue spreading the word. Growing its membership and knowledge base will be key to HCMC’s future and that of the field, High says.
“We want to be the go-to source for expertise,” she explains. “Right now, there are vendors and consultants that have different capacity management collaboratives or groups, but there’s no place where we can all go for a single source of truth. Someone might know to reach out to Jim Scheulen, Vikas Parekh, Rob Fogerty or me to get questions answered, but now we can point them to HCMC’s resources and network.”
To learn more about HCMC, access capacitymanagement.org.