We have a solution for the NHS that will save thousands of ICU nursing hours and hundreds of thousands of pounds every year.
This solution is in place at one of the largest university hospitals in the Nordics with over 27,000 employees. They have 150 adult ICU beds and have developed automation to assist the clinical staff with the transfer of live patient electronic observations data into the EPR. They are saving 60 hours of ICU nurse time for the ICU ward every single day.
How does it work?
At the hospital EPR has been implemented to improve the quality of care and interoperability across the health system.
Each ICU patient is connected to a set of medical devices to take their vital information. That information is then inputted into the Electronic Patient Record (EPR) system. Most EPR systems require the data input to have a manual validation (by a nurse) to enter the medical device data from each patient into the system. This ensures that hospital staff have the most up to date information to make decisions on care for their patients. In ICU a patient’s medical status can change rapidly and doctors and nurses need to know they are treating patients using the most up to date information available.
However, this data input stage is a significant time requirement for the nursing staff. The hospital policy is to have vital information that is no more than one hour old, and this requirement leads to manual work as the system requires end-user action to enter the new vital sign data into the system.
The solution:
The automation we have developed for the University Hospital is saving them over 60 hours of manual work by the ICU nurses every day. The automation conducts the same steps in the system as an ICU nurse would undertake to update vital electronic observations data. The solution runs 24 times a day, uninterrupted, at exactly the right time, consistently ensuring that clinicians have the most up to date information to support their decision making.
Use in the NHS:
In the UK, our ICU wards tend to be smaller than that of the Nordic University Hospital in this case study. With a 40-bed ICU ward, the ICU nursing staff would save at least one minute per hour per bed of manual work. This equates to 16 hours per day of time that ICU nursing staff can redeploy in other tasks like patient care.
We are now ready to bring this solution to the NHS. We are looking for NHS organisations who will collaborate with us to create a blueprint for this automation in the UK. We will deliver this to your Trust at a competitive fixed cost via a robust project plan with defined time scales to deliver by UK Spring 2021.
In return, we will ask for a case study on the implementation to share with our UK and international audience.
The results
With this automation solution, your ICU department will realise at least 16 hours of additional nursing time every day. You will also have the flexibility to increase the automation during peak periods.
If you are interested in finding out more about the automation of medical data inputs into EPR, register your interest with us at the link here.