WWJ Newsradio 950 - At Oakwood, Video Screens Offer Patient Care Details

GLITR

Posted: Thursday, 08 May 2008 3:01PM

At Oakwood, Video Screens Offer Patient Care Details

I got a peek at a major advancement in patient care amd safety at Oakwood Hospital and Medical Center in Dearborn Thursday.

It's called Horizon Enterprise Visibility by its manufacturer, McKesson Corp. of Alpharetta, Ga. But the project at Oakwood is

called simply "The View."

The View provides a constant visual representation of all of the 600-plus beds in the hospital -- whether they're full or empty, who's in them, what each patient's special medical needs are, and a host of other information.

It replaced an unwieldy manual paper-based system -- and in some respects replaced no system at all, giving the hospital entirely new capabilities, according to Monica Donofrio, senior director for care management and access.

Video screens throughout the hospital -- big ones at main nursing stations, smaller ones at other locations -- now show each hospital bed in a graphical layout reflecting the architecture of each floor. There are color codes for inpatients, outpatients and observation patients, colors and patterns for rooms that need cleaning or from which a patient is about to be discharged, and a wide variety of icons. The icons can indicate anything from a new physician order to recently received test results -- and whether those test results were normal, abnormal or critical -- and recently reviewed pharmacy orders or the availability of blood products. The icons also show whether or not particular patients should be kept in isolation or have special dietary needs. And, they show whether a patient should be kept on special protocols for three major killers -- acute heart attack, heart failure or pneumonia.

The icons and colors for each room also show whether a patient has already been assigned to it. They also show a variety of other concerns, from language barriers to making sure patients with identical or similar last names aren't confused when it comes to being given treatment, to making sure patients who are at risk for falling get special care.

Donofrio and Jeff Noland, View project manager, said the system flags nurses automatically, so they don't have to keep checking with the lab for test results or with doctors for patient orders.

There are also enterprise views of the bed status on every floor of the hospital in several areas, including the physicians' lounge, the nursing administration area and the bed management area. These allow for quick and accurate decisions to be made on staffing, according to Chrstine Tromp Hanba, a clinical manager at the hospital.

"I was a little leery of it at first -- I'm an old school nurse," she said. "But now I love it. We can balance staffing based on what we know is coming in even before the floor knows."

Oakwood officials say the system has cut emergency room waiting time and allowed them to cut the number of staffers that were assigned to assigning patients to beds and keeping track of them afterward.

The data is stored on two servers at Oakwood's data center, in a former department store building a couple of miles away from the hospital, with a backup server for failover at McKesson's data center.

The next stage of the project, Donofrio said, will be RFID tags for each patient that will track them throughout the hospital. Their current location will be shown on their room -- in transit or to laboratories, operating rooms or test areas.

And beyond that, Donofrio said OHS is evaluating systems for a full conversion to electronic medical records -- it's only about 50 percent there now -- and to move the View system to Oakwood's other hospitals in Wayne, Taylor and Trenton.

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