Hospitals build command centers

Hospitals are building command centers to run beds, transfers, staffing and transport from one hub instead of managing each bottleneck department by department. (modernhealthcare.com) Modern Healthcare reported on April 14 that systems are using these centers to spot delays across entire networks and standardize how hospitals respond. Tampa General Hospital opened its care coordination center in 2019 after its chief executive, John Couris, heard the idea from Dr. Peter Chang. (modernhealthcare.com) At Johns Hopkins Medicine, the Judy Reitz Capacity Command Center launched in 2016 and now ties together transfer calls, transport dispatch and bed management. Johns Hopkins says the center handles more than 20,000 access-line calls a month, facilitates about 700 transfers, and coordinates 40,000 patient transports a year. (hopkinsmedicine.org) The basic problem is patient flow: a hospital can have staffed beds on paper and still lose hours waiting for discharge orders, room cleaning, transport or a specialist to accept a transfer. Command-center software pulls those steps onto one screen so staff can see where a patient is stuck and who needs to act next. (epic.com) Health systems are also trying to manage across multiple hospitals, not just one campus. Epic says its capacity dashboards show open beds and projected admissions across a system in real time, and Johns Hopkins rolled out those dashboards enterprise-wide in October 2025 as a single view of throughput for every hospital. (epic.com) (it.johnshopkins.edu) That shift comes as hospitals keep chasing efficiency after years of labor shortages, high costs and crowded emergency departments. Kaufman Hall said hospitals ended 2025 with steadier operating margins, but providers still faced pressure from payer mix, bad debt and other underlying headwinds going into 2026. (kaufmanhall.com) (fiercehealthcare.com) Some systems are scaling the model well beyond a single hospital tower. Becker’s reported in May 2025 that Oregon Health and Science University’s Mission Control serves four hospitals, while AdventHealth built a large systemwide command center for its Central Florida region. (beckershospitalreview.com) Oregon Health and Science University then opened a centralized Mission Control space in September 2024, bringing together teams and technology that had operated since 2017. The university said the center tracks capacity across its own system, statewide hospital beds and regional behavioral health capacity. (news.ohsu.edu) Vendors are selling the model as a measurable operations tool, not just a wall of screens. GE HealthCare says its command-center platform is used in nearly 500 hospitals and medical facilities globally, covering more than 55,000 beds, and cites results including a 1.07-day reduction in length of stay at The Queen’s Health Systems and $40 million in labor savings at Duke Health. (gehealthcare.com) The harder part is not installing software but getting nursing, transport, environmental services, admitting and physicians to work from the same playbook. Johns Hopkins said its 2025 enterprise dashboard rollout was built with staff from nursing, bed planning, radiology and other departments, and it framed the project as the foundation for broader system governance. (it.johnshopkins.edu) Hospitals started these centers to find open beds faster, but the newer push is to make every site in a system operate from the same live picture. The bet is that fewer blind spots in the back office will mean fewer delays at the bedside. (modernhealthcare.com)