Natalie Heidel is a former HCA Performance Improvement Specialist. She has extensive expertise in inpatient flow and bed management operations. Her experience includes working with hospital executives and clinical staff members to improve patient throughput in the hospital setting.

Over the past 15 years, Natalie has led many performance improvement initiatives involving emergency services, inpatient nursing, environmental services, and procedural departments at for-profit hospitals, hospital systems, and large academic medical centers. Her recent experience has focused on implementing labor management foundational elements and creating sustainable staffing plans for Emergency Departments.

University of Michigan Health System, HCA West Florida Division, Swedish Medical Center, Orlando Health Hospitals, Maine Medical Center, Envision Physician Services, Prisma Health Hospitals, Abbott Point of Care, Centura Health – Littleton Adventist Hospital, Bronson Healthcare, Harris Health System

• Designed and implemented Emergency Department staffing grids to align nurse shifts by day of week and hour of day patient volumes – annual savings of $2.5M.

• Determined new productivity standards for 5 Diagnostics departments by creating zero-based staffing plans – annual savings of $79k.

• Assessed APP and hospitalist partnership model and recommended reorganization to improve productivity – savings of $530k.

• Conducted in-person training sessions with 300 variable department leaders to educate on labor management foundations and productivity action planning.

• Implemented a patient placement technology system in 16 hospitals, including managing project plans, creating educational materials, and training super-users.

• Reduced inpatient admission handoff times from the Emergency Department, from 105 minutes to 34 minutes.

• Created monthly bed management scorecards allowing hospital executive teams and department directors to review trended performance metrics.

• Partnered with perioperative leaders to design staffing grids based on block schedules, AORN guidelines, and day of week volume (for pre-op, OR, PACU) – savings of $4.1M to run rate.