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Temple Transport and Communications Center Earns Statewide Recognition for Excellence and Innovation

Temple University Hospital was honored by the Hospital & Healthsystem Association of Pennsylvania (HAP) as a winner in the organization's 2012 Achievement Awards Program, which recognizes hospitals and health systems for their innovation, creativity and commitment to patient care.

Among the awards in that program is HAP's Innovation Award, presented for exemplary work in an organization through the introduction of a bold breakthrough idea or intervention that goes beyond typical and has resulted in improved system-wide outcomes.

HAP presented the 2012 Innovation Award (one of two presented statewide this year) – as well as an award for Operational Excellence (one of four presented statewide) – to Thomas A. Kurtz, MHS, PA-C, NREMT-P, Associate Hospital Director for Emergency Services, Logistics and Specialty Care Transport at Temple University Hospital and Temple Transport Team (T3) for a project titled, "Creation of a Health System-Based Comprehensive Access to Care and Patient Safety."

Over the past 18 months, Kurtz, in collaboration with Gerald Wydro, MD, Program Director, and Evan Resnikoff, MS, NREMT-P, Operations Manager- Communications Center of the Temple Transport Team, and other Temple colleagues, have created the Temple Transport Team Comprehensive Communications Center (T3/C3).

Temple's "nerve center" for handling all patient transfers and direct admissions, T3/C3 arranges transfers and air and ground transports for inbound referrals to Temple.

Since becoming operational on February 9, 2011, T3/C3's operations have benefitted Temple and its patients in several important ways. Under their direction, all patients being transferred (inpatient-to-inpatient and emergency department (ED)-to-ED) or directly admitted to Temple are coordinated by one team of clinicians under one roof, thereby eliminating delays and inefficiencies related to information hand-offs between departments. By establishing conference calls immediately between the referring and receiving physicians, T3/C3 has markedly increased the satisfaction of referring physicians and decreased delays in patient access to quaternary care.

In addition, T3/C3 is responsible for helipad surveillance and "door-to-balloon" (D2B) alerts and tracking. D2B time is an important quality metric that tracks how quickly a heart attack patient is moved from the emergency department to the Cath Lab for life saving treatment.

Temple's T3/C3 effectively addresses the challenge faced by large, quaternary, academic medical centers of providing access and safe delivery of care, not only to patients residing in areas surrounding them, but also to patients being referred and transferred to them for higher level of care, specialty services and physicians, and/or cutting edge technology. T3/C3's combination of skilled personnel and sophisticated technological resources provides a centralized hub that effectively links the referring and receiving (accepting) physicians, and efficiently integrates the functions of the various hospital departments involved in the patient transfer, transport, and direct admissions processes.

Date Published: Thursday, July 19, 2012

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