PATIENT RECORDS
A Matching demand and availability
of hospital beds – in real time
s a statement of the blindingly obvious you probably can’t
beat “beds are important to hospitals”. We measure the comparative size of hospitals by the number of beds it has. Without an available bed patients won’t be admitted from A&E - and operations can be postponed.
Ineffective management of beds can lengthen patient stays and unnecessarily reduce the overall capacity of the hospital with an adverse effect on patients, those who care for them, and the finances of the trust.
Getting better at bed management needs, most of all, timely communications and co-ordination between the professionals in clinical departments, nursing, patient placement, environmental services and patient transport.
This is a real team game. But however well-integrated the team, accurate, up to date information about the bed status now and planned admissions and transfers is vital.
Worcestershire Acute Hospitals and Oasis Medical Solutions put their skill and imagination together to develop a real time bed management system – Oasis WhiteBoard. After an iterative and agile development cycle, it is now in the process of being deployed at the Worcestershire Royal Hospital.
All hospital staff are familiar with the traditional whiteboard as an efficient and popular way of managing beds and placing patients. The Oasis WhiteBoard (physically a large touch-
Sep/Oct 10
screen) gives the flexibility of a traditional board but with all the benefits of connection to the central patient database, which is updated automatically when the patient name and location is selected by fingertip on the touch-screen and moved to a new location in a drag and drop movement. No keyboard entries are required and the patient database is updated.
It displays bed and patient- pending status to the whole team accurately and automatically in real time. In addition, the screen and the constantly updated information behind it can also; · monitor the bed cleaning process
· communicate real time information on patient discharges and transfers
· alert doctors and nurses when tests are to be carried out or when results are ready
It was designed and developed to be independent of any single patient administration system.
This independence and flexibility enables hospitals, within the same trust but with different core IT systems, to use the system in combination - giving flexibility across the whole trust. And it makes it possible for trusts, within a single health economy, to share information on bed availability and to process transactions.
The information feeding the real time whiteboard can only be captured at ward level. The system is designed to reduce and not increase the workload of staff at the front line so it encourages take up and consistent real time use of its features.
“It has been built from the bottom up so we could
address everything that was required. It is important that the whiteboard is easier and less time consuming for our staff - otherwise they would miss the added value,” says Worcestershire Health ICT Services director, John Thornbury.
Oasis WhiteBoard was developed by the London-based Oasis Medical Solutions development team alongside clinicians and managers at Worcestershire Acute Hospitals Trust.
The focus was on delivering real benefit to NHS clinicians through making it simple to use and easy to deploy.
Not only an effective way of managing a key asset but a demonstrable example of quality, innovation, productivity and prevention - in action today.
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