Coventry and Warwick install digital patient tracking

University Hospitals Coventry and Warwickshire NHS Trust has implemented a new web-based emergency department patient tracking system called ED Whiteboard from ExtraMed.

The system can be accessed on any computer within the department and has one main touch-screen style whiteboard for clinicians in busy emergency departments to keep track of which patients have or haven’t been seen and an idea of bed availability in the hospital.

ExtraMed’s product director, Alwyn Davies, demonstrated the system to E-Health Insider and explained: “Every single staff member in the department has access to the system, and through the Whiteboard they are able to monitor the status and needs of patients in A&E. These can be changed, as and when a patient is seen simply by touching the screen and identifying the problems. The listings are colour-coded so the patient’s status can be monitored and nurses simply walk up to it, touch the relevant sections and then leave it for the next staff member to look at.”

University Hospital Coventry’s emergency department (ED) treats more than 120,000 people each year and has consistently met the government’s four-hour ED target time despite rising patient numbers and the challenge of relocating the department from the former Walsgrave Hospital to its current home in the new University Hospital.

The trust wanted a product that would continue to help meet this target, but would make keeping track of patients less of a staff pressure.

Davies said: “The methods University Hospital Coventry were using were very successful, but incredibly staff intensive. We were able to help them to consolidate all their information and push it all together onto one screen so that each patient who came in for emergency treatment would be visible on the board from entrance to discharge.

“This simply means that nurses and consultants can look to one place for all the information they need and not have to make numerous calls to get urgent questions answered like who needs your attention? Where do you need to act to ensure that no-one breeches wait times? Are there any bottlenecks forming? Do you need to call for assistance to overcome a blockage? and so on.”

The technology has been evolving since its introduction in Bedford Hospital in 2005.

Nick Elliott, chief technology officer at University Hospitals Coventry and Warwickshire NHS Trust, said: “We decided to install ExtraMed’s ED Whiteboard product after trialling the system with clinicians in our emergency department who found it hugely effective and easy to use.

“In building the ED Whiteboard, the ExtraMed team has demonstrated a real understanding of clinicians’ needs and they have used that knowledge to produce a system that presents the relevant information in a clear and concise way. The Whiteboard has already proved successful in other hospitals and I’m confident it will perform similarly well here in Coventry.”

As well as keeping staff informed of every patient who is admitted to the ED, the system can also be used to keep notes on tests ordered, results received and diagnoses.

The system is able to create a patient record so that should the patient come in again, a record of their previous medical history in the ED is available for nurses to easily check. It can also be used for bed management, allowing nurses to be notified when a bed is free and allocate patients quickly to the nearest available bed on the ward.

Davies told EHI: “ED Whiteboard is a web management system as well as a bed referrals system. It can help drastically save time, especially when you think that A&E teams do not have to make continuous phone calls to find beds for a patient to go to. The system can capture all activity and the staff member can quickly allocate a patient to a particular staff member and to a particular ward bed.

“It can also auto populate information to create the GP treatment letter, so that staff do not have to go into a system and re-enter all the treatment information. Using specified fields, the system can create a basic letter for the GP with all the relevant information and send it to an administrator for printing.”

ExtraMed recently secured £500,000 of investment from the Sigma Innovation Fund, the Scottish Enterprise’s Scottish Seed Fund and from HBOS (Halifax Bank of Scotland) to further develop products for the NHS market.

The company says they are speaking to a number of trusts about their existing products and are also looking into new products to help tackle the 18 week Referral-to-Treatment programme and a modified order comms tool.

They are working independently of Connecting for Health, but say that their collaborative information exchange with their customers, makes them a market leader in healthcare IT.

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