Connected Care: Reducing Errors Through Automated Vital Signs Data Upload

In infirmary departments where patients are not routinely on continuous monitoring such every bit full general medical wards, nursing assistants or technicians are responsible for collecting patients' vital signs data on a scheduled basis, every few hours. To practise this, they exercise rounds, collect vital signs, very often record them on newspaper, and enter the information into electronic medical records later on all patients' vitals have been collected – which can lead to transcription errors¹.

At the Robert Ballanger Intercommunal Infirmary, in France, this long winded process is no longer in place: newspaper has disappeared. "The monitors are direct connected to the electronic medical records and the nurses practice not demand to write information down or enter data manually later", describes Mathieu Saint-Marc, Biomedical Engineer.

Located in Seine-Saint-Denis, Robert Ballanger Intercommunal Hospital is a public institution with 668 beds for medicine, inpatient and outpatient surgery, obstetrics, pediatrics, rehabilitation, and psychiatry. The infirmary – which serves a population of 450,000 – recently underwent major facility improvements and launched an aggressive renovation plan. The projection led to an even bigger venture: becoming a paperless facility.

"Vital signs are a key component of patient care and handling. We have virtually 40 to fifty patients in our ward daily. Nosotros bear out about 60 to eighty vital sign cheque-ups per solar day, explains Mathieu Saint-Marc. Our ambition was to move away from paper so that nurses can accept more time to talk to their patients and practice clinical examinations".

But the big move abroad from paper was not an piece of cake i. This meant finding a way to send patient data from medical devices directly to an electronic medical record organisation in a way that is both transparent and user-friendly.

Given the demand to protect the security of patient data and minimize the likelihood of data existence sent to the wrong record, having an effective and secure patient identification process was a major challenge. But at the same time, a patient identification process that requires besides many steps quickly becomes tiresome for caregivers, who then may not follow it routinely. "Our objective was to make sure the patient data would be condom and avert errors, merely also to simplify our processes and be more efficient" he explains.

"Nosotros ended upward with a simple three-stride patient identification process: turning on the system, scanning the patient ID with a barcode reader, which automatically displays the patient'south identity information on the screen, and validating the identity of the patient." The results from the measurements taken are then automatically sent to the validated patient's record.

Hospital teams worked with GE Healthcare to address specific healthcare services and consultation needs related to transmission of data from blood vital signs. The goal was to send these parameters (BP, SpO2, pulse charge per unit and temperature) direct to the patient record.

The hospital took a major step in the direction of becoming a existent paperless hospital in 2014-15 with the successful deployment equally an early adopter of new patient monitoring devices, GE's CARESCAPE VC150 vital signs monitor, that mensurate and record blood pressure and blood oxygen saturation levels, with connectivity to electronic medical records in the edifice.

The hospital's venture to 'become a paperless facility' has been very successful: "now that the starting time department is working well, we programme on deploying information technology in all intendance areas as shortly as possible. Data capturing and data transcription are prone to lots of mistakes – we remove the risk of errors and we secure the process to improve efficiency and quality of patient intendance." he concludes.

The CARESCAPE VC150 vital signs monitor was launched at Arab Wellness today. Follow The Pulse @ArabHealth for more.

Larn more about the Robert Ballanger infirmary'due south feel using the CARESCAPE VC150 vital signs monitor in this video:

^one Ref. Smith LB, Banner Fifty, Lozano D, Olney CM, Friedman B. Connected Care: Reducing errors through automatic vital signs data upload. CIN: Computers, Informatics, Nursing. 2009; 27(five)

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Source: https://matclinic.com/2016/01/25/collecting-patient-vital-signs-from-papers-to-connected-monitors/

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