Luz Saude

Cristina Mesquita is a Director of Clinical Operations Design and Control at Luz Saúde, with expertise in hospital and healthcare management. Skilled in negotiation, business planning, and operations, she drives quality, efficiency, and innovation to enhance patient care and organizational performance.

In an exclusive interview with MedTech Outlook Europe, Cristina Mesquita shared her views on hospital patients’ flow.

Digitally Driven Flow for Seamless Care

To optimize patient flow across the whole healthcare organization, a focus on digital and analytical tools is increasingly emphasized for better and informed decisions, providing support to operations around the patients’ flow.

The biggest gains come when hospitals treat patient flow as a single, end-to-end process, aligning technology, infrastructure capacity, and staff workflows into one coordinated system. One of the major questions is always: how to enable a higher throughput of patients, improving efficiency? We know that a system is only as efficient as its weakest part.

A well-designed patient flow model ensures timely care, reduces wait times (balancing patient influx with available resources), and optimizes complex resource allocation (to changeable patient demands), leading to improved patient satisfaction and operational effectiveness.

If it all started with Integrated Electronic Health Records, allowing clinicians to access up-to-date information in real time, we can now use endless tools to improve patient flow. They can smooth the journey from admission to discharge and cut traditional bottlenecks, providing data to inform decisions. From robotics and digital assistants to AI, hospitals are increasingly adopting new technologies to support operational scale, predictability, and automation.

Tech Arsenal for a Faster, Smoother Journey

Among others, patients’ flow processes can benefit from:

• Smart Triage Systems - Reduce unnecessary delays and ensure that critical cases receive immediate attention.

• Pre-arrival data collection, self-check-in kiosks, or mobile apps - Patients provide their information beforehand, speeding up the check-in process.

• Virtual queue systems – That provide real-time updates about queue status, allowing patients to wait remotely until it’s their turn, easing overcrowding in waiting areas.

• AI-powered predictive analytics embedded in capacity platforms - that anticipate patient demand patterns, surges, no-show cases, average length of stay, risk stratification, discharge bottlenecks, identification of patterns that cause delays, and calculate staff and other resource needs. To improve OR utilization, surgery time duration according to the specific case and smart scheduling (level-load ORs and PACUs) allows reduced turnarounds and non-useful slot time.

“Efficient patient flow is not just crucial for delivering quality healthcare but also for easing the workload of healthcare professionals.”

• Inpatient capacity management platforms – to optimize and smooth occupancy rate levels by admitting patients based on length of stay and ICU risk. They can provide real-time and future visibility on hospital capacity, enabling quicker transfers and admissions, flag patients ready for discharge and anticipate future needs, bottlenecks, risks, and scenarios following strategic decisions, allowing proactive scheduling of elective procedures according to capacity (beds, human resources and other equipment). It can also efficiently connect and navigate support staff like cleaners, food services, porters, and clinical staff, preventing classic problems. Ideally, these platforms should be integrated with support services, like logistics and vendors (in a just-in-time way), financial departments and human resources departments, providing data to inform decisions, allowing cost-benefit analysis, contributing to outcomes research and value analysis.

Outpatient capacity management platforms for day hospitals and outpatient offices can also improve resource utilization and provide demand heat mappings that show real-time foot traffic, highlight problem areas, and help forecast how people move during different times of the day. Real-time location systems of clients also allow proactive professional allocation.

• Real-time dashboards – to monitor inpatient relevant metrics, allowing better decisions, improved performance and control of operations.

• IOT sensors to track relevant equipment in real time and prevent delays.

• Discharge Planning Software can bridge to other healthcare facilities, providing continuity of care and preventing readmissions.

• Telehealth, remote monitoring, mobile diagnostic tools, and free in-person slots.

• Virtual cockpits can smoothly and agilely image departments.

• Speech recognition technology to fill EPR automatically with the relevant data and free clinical staff time.

Optimizing Care Through AI and Automation

Efficient patient flow is not just crucial for delivering quality healthcare but also for easing the workload of healthcare professionals. To make the hospital efficient and effective in delivering the right care at the right time and place, and at the right cost, process reengineering, automation and artificial intelligence are essential. At Luz Saúde, we are walking this path, tracking patients’ journey at the hospital and pre-booking, to assure adequate levels of experience, and at the same time, creating a clear vision of resource allocation and used capacity, to achieve the targeted efficiency.

But if technology can help achieve those goals, it leads us to an old but now increased challenge… systems integration.

Command centers are being implemented to track and optimize capacity and to identify and act on arising bottlenecks. Putting those who are responsible for hospital operations in real-time access to relevant data allows their integration and consequent optimization of decisions, eventually increasing predictability. But in the future, if we manage to integrate all the data produced into a hospital, can AI eventually do the job? Prescribing better actions for scheduling, capacity building and resource allocation? Probably yes!