News
Visual display of patient flow enables Walsall Hospital to manage
patients more efficiently
11 June 2009
Walsall Hospitals NHS Trust has installed a visual control system
that displays up-to-date patient flow information on large LCD screens,
allowing staff to better manage beds, results reporting and patient
discharge.
The Trust has installed Horizon Enterprise Visibility, a visual
control system designed specifically for hospitals, from healthcare IT
solutions and services specialists, McKesson.
Via real-time access to patient information, Walsall will be using
Horizon Enterprise Visibility to improve resource efficiency and bed
utilisation to reduce costs and improve the quality of patient care.
This electronic whiteboard designed to sit at ward level across a
hospital, replacing the current manual whiteboards, works by taking
feeds from the hospital’s disparate information systems and displaying
patient flow information using colour-coded, time-stamped icons against
a hospital floor plan.
The information is displayed on large-format LCD screens and is
highly intuitive. This allows staff to see at a glance when beds are
free, who is waiting to be discharged, patient safety attributes and
when imaging results, lab results and prescriptions are ready.
The proven benefits of Horizon Enterprise Visibility that Walsall
Hospitals are looking to accomplish include a saving of one hour per
nurse per shift per day. This is achieved by a saving of up to 7-10
phone calls and 3-4 wasted logins to various information systems per
day.
Brigid Stacey, Chief Operating Officer, Walsall Hospitals NHS Trust,
said, “We decided that McKesson’s Horizon Enterprise Visibility was the
solution that would best match our needs, not least due to its already
proven capabilities and benefits.
"We have every reason to believe that this solution will accelerate
and underpin our efforts to ensure that we operate in a ‘lean’ fashion
and in step with The Productive Ward and Quality initiatives.
"Moreover, we expect to improve data quality on source systems by
making our data visible in a collective fashion and in doing so reduce
clinician dependence on nursing and support staff for information.
“Our initial implementation has focused on bed requests and
fulfilment from unplanned care to the wards. Since our implementation of
Horizon Enterprise Visibility, the bed allocation process for our
planned admissions has been expedited by up to 3 hours.
"The system is also broadcasting the status of radiology and
pathology results, Bed clean requests and patient safety attributes [eg
fall risk, nil by mouth, MRSA SWAB status], and utilising the timer
device to alert staff to patients requiring bed turns.
"Our early experience of Horizon Enterprise Visibility is incredibly
promising and our plans to incorporate RFID feeds for patient and
equipment tracking and to take feeds from our remaining systems are on
track to be realised in the near future.”
Charmaine McDonald, UK Managing Director, commented: “By combining
our industry-leading healthcare information technology and the scale of
our business with unsurpassed clinical knowledge, we remain steadfast in
our commitment to understanding the needs of the UK healthcare sector.
Our customers are particularly aware of the benefits of working with a
partner whose only business is healthcare, like McKesson.
"We are confident that visual controls will be recognised as the
preferred method for driving and sustaining process improvement in the
acute care setting and supporting the NHS with its initiatives such as
Quality and Innovation and The Productive Ward.
"A single view of the acute environment that shows the status of
every ward, the status of every bed and the location of every patient as
they move throughout the hospital replaces a great amount of
time-consuming communication, and dramatically improves efficiencies
with immediate effects. And most importantly, visual controls that help
clinicians to work more efficiently will ultimately result in improved
service delivery and improved patient care.”
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