Improving the Efficiency of a Military Treatment Facility Transfer Center Process

A performance improvement project was initiated at Tripler Army Medical Center (TAMC) to decrease the amount of inpatient stays by military beneficiaries at civilian hospitals. Before the start of the project, the transfer process from external emergency rooms was completed by patient administration personnel and residents. This process had a median time to disposition decision of 40 minutes and led to missed opportunities for TAMC to care for military beneficiaries. The goals for the project were to have the median transfer process at less than 30 minutes from first call to time of disposition, to minimize unnecessary transfer denials, and to improve the perception of TAMC transfer process.

The team implemented multiple countermeasures as a performance improvement project to improve the transfer process. These included enhancing technological capabilities, providing clinically trained personnel to answer initial telephone calls, establishing rapid attending physician contact for acceptance, and standardizing data collection. Descriptive data were used to describe the progress toward project goals to include median time to disposition, number of monthly calls, and reasons for denials of patient transfers.

The project met all proposed goals. The median time to disposition decision was reduced to 22 minutes. The primary reasons for denials included that the transfer was considered medically unnecessary (40.6%), no beds were available (18.9%), and the patient was unstable for transport (14.9%). As a reflection of improved customer service, there was an overall increase in transfer requests and positive feedback from the referring physicians at the local civilian hospitals.

The improved transfer process at TAMC resulted in a decreased median time of transfer request process, increased total transfer requests, and improved relationships with local civilian hospitals. While we acknowledge that each MTF has facility and regional characteristics (such as capability, capacity, military staffing, and degree of availability of civilian healthcare resources) that may contribute to variation from TAMC, the concepts and changes made in the transfer process may be considered a best practice to be adopted by other military facilities to promote the recapture of beneficiaries into the Defense Health Agency system.