Quality Performance of a Transfer Center Reduces Interhospital Transfer and Direct Admission-Related ED Evaluations

Transfer centers play a vital role in the efficient triage of hospital admission requests that generate outside the emergency department (ED) of the given facility. This cohort study includes all the calls processed through the transfer center requesting an admission to Mayo Clinic, Rochester, from January 2016 to December 2018. More than 116,000 transfer request calls were processed. Of these, about 65% (75,000) were accepted for ED evaluation or direct admission. Of the 75,000 patients, >50% were accepted as direct admits. Among patients accepted for direct admission, a trend toward reduced utilization of ED reevaluation at the receiving facility was noted from 2016 to 2018. A temporal trend of overall reduced ED utilization reflects the adeptness of the transfer center. An effective transfer center promotes value-based care, optimizes the workflow in a hospital, and augments hospital administrative decisions to allocate resources.