Walsall Hospitals NHS Trust has implemented Horizon Enterprise Visibility, a visual control system designed specifically for hospitals by McKesson.
According to the company, via real-time access to patient information the Trust will be hoping to improve resource efficiency and bed utilisation to reduce costs and improve the quality of patient care.
An electronic whiteboard is used on wards across the hospital and takes feeds from the hospital’s disparate information systems to display patient flow information using colour-coded, time-stamped icons against a hospital floor plan.
Staff can use the display to see which beds are available and who is waiting to be discharged. The electronic whiteboard will also display when prescriptions and lab and imaging results are ready.
The hospital is aiming to return a saving of one hour per nurse per shift per day by reducing the number of phone calls made and the number of systems that staff need to login to.
Brigid Stacey, Chief Operating Officer, Walsall Hospitals NHS Trust, said that the Trust has already seen benefits from implementing the system.
“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,” Stacey said. “The system is also broadcasting the status of radiology and pathology results, Bed Clean Requests and Patient Safety Attributes (e.g. 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.”
Stacey added that the Trust is hoping to add RFID feeds for patient and equipment tracking in the near future.
“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,” said Charmaine McDonald, UK Managing Director at McKesson.
