Bedside computers help hospitals to deliver on their primary objectivesPatient care and safety are the primary concerns for Hospitals and Healthcare delivery organizations (both during and after their time in hospital), better use of technology (at the right time and in the right place) can help to improve patient outcomes and reduce the risk of errors.
Despite the best efforts of medical and support staff as many as one in ten patients are harmed (or killed) by medical errors according to the World Health Organisation. The Institute of Medicine’s report ‘To Err is Human’ identified that between 44,000 to 98,000 deaths each year in the US are due to medical error. The various types of errors can include misdiagnoses, clinical omissions, procedural errors and medication errors. In the case of medication-related error, it is estimated that over one million serious medication errors occur each year in US hospitals causing an estimated 7,000 deaths.
Hospitals around the world are striving to reduce this problem in the interest of improving clinical outcomes and patient care. The root causes are many, but include such contributing factors as fatigue, distraction, lack of knowledge, poor communication and even deliberate wrongdoing. Report after report has shown that judicious deployment of information technology can dramatically reduce the instance of errors. Bedside computing solutions are the last link in the chain between a hospital’s clinical IT systems providing clinicians with up-to-date information at the point of care, ensuring compliance with safeguards such as “the five rights” process for administering medications, and reducing the need for handwritten paper notes and re-keying of information.
In its report “Improving Health Sector Efficiency The Role of Information and Communication Technologies” the OECD outlines how better deployment of IT can contribute to improved care delivery by providing medical staff with secure and timely access to the information they need for diagnosis, treatment and management of patients. Bedside computers enable clinicians to securely access the relevant clinical systems at the point of care for:
- more efficient management of patient care pathways
- accurate and timely entering of real-time observations,
- real-time review and update patient records
- ordering/view medical tests, results and prescriptions
- enabling better and more transparent collaborate across care teams
Concern over care also extends beyond the patient’s stay in hospital. By providing patients with relevant information about their illness, aftercare, rehabilitation and their medication can dramatically reduce recovery time and helps avoid unnecessary re-admissions. Bedside computers can be used to deliver highly personalized and intuitive education packages as part of the patient discharge process using interactive technology to ensure the patient has understood.
