Ashley Helfer has been hired as the Director of Patient Flow and Bed Management. In this role she will have oversight of Nursing Supervision, Patient Placement and the Centralized Nursing Resource Office.
Ashley worked as a patient flow consultant after working for 10 years at the Queen’s Medical Center in Hawaii, where she was Manager of Patient Flow, Patient Placement and Social Work.
While at Queen’s, she initiated the Queen’s Care Coalition, a program that focused on reducing readmissions for frequent users of the hospital’s emergency department. The project reduced readmission from 21 to 5 percent and reduced average hospitalized days from 6 to 4 per month for this group of patients. She also predictively managed demand and capacity through creation of a data driven bed allocation plan, among other initiatives.
Ashley’s position at NHRMC will help drive System Utilization that falls under the Access plank of the NHRMC Strategic Plan.
“We have implemented a series of focused initiatives over the past two years to help with patient access to our organization and improve flow and throughput,” said Sarah Brannan, Administrator of Operations. “We want to ensure that patients are receiving the right care at the right time and that we are maximizing the use of our available patient spaces. Ashley is the right person to help us achieve our goals.”
Ashley has earned a B.S. in Nursing, a Master of Science in Nursing Executive Leadership, and an MBA, all from the University of Hawaii.