Making space for life saving care: Inside Baptist Health’s data-driven command center strategy
As hospitals across the country grapple with rising patient volumes, long wait times and overstretched staff, Baptist Health (Ark.) is proving that the solution isn’t always more space — it’s smarter coordination.
During a recent webinar hosted by Becker’s Healthcare and LeanTaaS, Cody Walker, president of Baptist Health Medical Center-North Little Rock, shared how the health system’s centralized, AI-powered command center is transforming patient flow across Arkansas. Since launching in 2022, the initiative has reduced emergency department (ED) boarding by 525 patients per month, reduced length of stay variance by 28%, and dropped discharge processing times from 135 to 79 minutes..
Here are four key takeaways from the conversation:
1. Centralizing transfers for systemwide coordination
In 2022, Baptist Health centralized its patient transfer functions into a dedicated command center. The move allowed staff to coordinate transfers across the entire 12-hospital system, rather than funneling all traffic through the flagship campus.
“When you do this and allow people a 50,000 foot view of the system and the autonomy to place patients in the appropriate level of care, big things can happen,” Mr. Walker said. “We went from organizing transfers to our central hub to organizing transfers through the whole health system. We really capitalized on that vision of helping all of the state.”
The command center also empowered referring physicians in rural areas through a mobile app, which provided clinical guidelines and direct access to Baptist’s care teams. A model that made it easier to say “yes” to more patients.
2. From guess-work to actionable planning
Despite early wins, Baptist soon faced the same national crisis plaguing emergency departments everywhere: patients boarding in emergency departments (EDs) due to delayed discharges and capacity bottlenecks.
To address this, Baptist partnered with LeanTaaS to integrate real-time data into daily operations with iQueue for Inpatient Flow, a prescriptive and predictive AI solution. With iQueue, hospital leaders could now forecast demand, identify discharges and pinpoint bottlenecks hours in advance. This was a shift that transformed morning huddles from guesswork to actionable planning.
“Since launch, we’re able to make high-level decisions based off the data versus having to put the data together,” Mr. Walker said. “It served as a catalyst for us to be on this culture change journey that otherwise would’ve taken an inordinate amount of time and probably leaders leaving along the way because of the burnout effect that we were experiencing before.”
3. Streamlining discharges for faster bed availability
Inspired by airline and aerospace efficiencies, Baptist focused on compressing the time between discharging a patient and admitting the next.
Through a combination of simplifying discharge steps, parallel processing, automated alerts and setting aggressive internal benchmarks, the hospital reduced the average patient turnover time by up to 60 percent.
Since the start of this transformational work, Baptist Health has reduced average discharge processing time from 135 to 79 minutes systemwide and have given more than 20,000 hours back to ED patients.
“We took a hard look at our discharge process,” Mr. Walker said. “If you can’t show me the requirement or who wrote it, then it’s just a recommendation. Let’s challenge our assumptions, remove personal feelings, and be relentless about improving this process for patients.”
4. Leadership and accountability fuel sustained results
With executive buy-in and real-time accountability alerts, Baptist embedded a new culture of urgency and data-informed decision-making.
A weekly systemwide report-out holds leaders accountable to key performance metrics, including ED pull times, EVS room turnover, and discharges by 11 a.m. The impact has been measurable: length of stay variance dropped by 28%, ED boarding dropped by 525 patients per month, and discharges before 11 a.m. jumped by 50%, all of this creating the equivalent of a 32-bed unit by recapturing capacity through efficiency gains.
Looking ahead, Baptist is focused on automating diversion decisions, expanding repatriation pathways and further smoothing surgical schedules, all designed to ensure patients receive timely care, no matter where they enter the system.
“It’s this momentum that everybody’s bought in,” Mr. Walker said. “There’s this executive support and accountability around executing on the data for the betterment of the patients that the whole team is rowing in the same direction now. It’s not that anybody’s pushing it, it’s just the expectation.”
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