Transforming Patient Flow with a Live Acuity-Based Bed Board
When one of our hospital partners set out to gain a more accurate picture of staffing needs across their inpatient units, they recognized that a simple patient census was no longer enough. While census numbers show how many patients are present, they do not reflect the complexity of care each patient requires. The hospital wanted a real-time solution that incorporated patient acuity documented directly in MEDITECH to provide a clearer view of workload and resource requirements.
Working closely with clinical and operational leaders, the hospital first established acuity guidelines for each unit using nationally recognized standards. Our team then helped translate those guidelines into MEDITECH by developing documentation section rules that automatically calculate acuity scores based on responses captured in Patient Care System (PCS) assessments.
To bring this information to life, we partnered with the hospital to create a live patient bed board in Power BI. The board displays every occupied room and visually identifies patient acuity through a series of color-coded indicators based on the most recently documented acuity score. In addition, we developed a suite of real-time patient status icons that illuminate automatically when specific conditions are present, including:
Discharge orders
Transfer orders
Isolation precautions
1:1 sitter requirements
Medivac patients
The result is a highly intuitive operational dashboard that gives nursing leaders and bed management teams immediate visibility into both patient volume and patient complexity. Data refreshes every five minutes, providing near real-time information while maintaining exceptional performance and virtually no impact on the MEDITECH database.
The success of the project extended beyond the live bed board itself. We also developed an Acuity Analytics Dashboard that tracks both acuity and census trends over time. This allows leaders to identify important patterns, such as peak and low-acuity periods throughout the day, seasonal fluctuations, and long-term trends that can influence staffing and operational planning.
Today, the bed board has become an essential tool used throughout the hospital every day to support decision-making, patient flow, and staff allocation. Looking ahead, the next phase of the project will incorporate UKG timekeeping data, enabling the organization to compare staffing levels against both census and patient acuity. This additional insight will help ensure staffing resources are aligned with actual patient care demands, supporting both operational efficiency and high-quality patient care.
When data moves beyond counting patients and begins measuring care complexity, hospitals gain the insight needed to make smarter staffing decisions and better support both caregivers and patients.
