The Opportunity
It was the year 2015. SKH took occupancy of Alexandra Hospital in Queenstown. There was no clear visibility of real-time bed statuses in the hospital. While the hospital was not fully reliant on manual processes, a better bed status system within the hospital information system would result in shorter bed turnover time and waiting time for patients, and improved efficiency for nurses to focus on patient care instead of checking on available beds.
The Solution
The IHiS team, together with the users and vendors, came up with an integrated Bed Management System (BMS) to provide real-time online information for bed management. From managing, optimising and automating patient flow from admission to discharge, the team planned and implemented technologies to manage acute with integration to the Real Time Locating System. At SKH, the team also implemented it for the Department of Emergency Medicine (DEM) and for managing beds of day surgery patients.
Key Features
• Search function displays the location of patients in the ward. Ward staff can view any outstanding actions for the patient, notes on the patient’s specific needs and any planned movements to other wards.
• Better bed assignment. Patients are allocated beds according to care types to facilitate right care.
• Real-time notifications to housekeeping teams of newly vacated beds to speed up bed availability. Using the mobile application, housekeeping teams are given a visibility of bed readiness at the wards via the bed turnover module.
• Care Visibility View. This enhanced feature improves visibility of bed situations on dashboards in all the wards and executive dashboard on Bed Management Unit, Housekeeping and Executive office.
Benefits:
Improved bed turnover timings: Real-time cleaning job notifications and status updates are provided to the housekeepers’ mobile devices as soon as patients were discharged.
Enhanced efficiency at the DEM: Better bed allocation for patients who require acute management with real-time data pulled from the BMS.
During early implementation for SKH’s first production mock run in December 2017, interoperable issues arose when messages could not be exchanged between the BMS and other systems. This meant that the other teams could not be notified. Our IHiS teams and vendor conducted several rounds of testing across a new server and the test environment.
They also simulated the software usage before the actual deployment of the system.
“Where possible, we conducted thorough and multiple simulations of deployment activities to identify processes and systems gaps. This has greatly minimised critical known issues on the ground ahead of the opening,” said Michele Li, Assistant Lead Analyst. “The team showed resilience in resolving unexpected challenges and urgent requests from stakeholders which could have impacted the official opening,” she added.
The re-installation activities were successfully completed within five weeks, in time for the production mock run.
