Hospitals work to provide quality, safety, and availability to patients with a wide variety of care needs, which makes efficient prioritization and resource utilization essential. Anticipation of each patients' trajectory, while monitoring available resources across the hospital, are major challenges for patient flow management. This study focuses on how hospital patient flow management is realized in situ with the help of concepts from cognitive systems engineering. Five semi-structured interviews with high level managers and shadowing observations of seven full work-shifts with management teams were conducted to explore how patient flow is coordinated and communicated across the hospital. The data has been analysed using qualitative content analysis. The results describe patient flow management using an adapted Extended Control Model (ECOM) and reveal how authority and information might be better placed closer to clinical work for increased efficiency of patient flow.