The Patient Monitoring System is a simple web-based application to help ward staff manage patient traffic and bed allocation within a hospital. It makes the daily process of patient and bed management easier, improves staff efficiency by saving time and helps management meet hospital performance targets.
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“No patient should spend more than 4 hours waiting in A & E departments – from arrival to admission, transfer or discharge” – NHS Plan for England.
Blueberry has helped develop an A&E Patient Monitoring System for the East and North Hertfordshire NHS Trust which is being recommended by the Trust for supply to other A&E departments in the UK.
The ‘Klok’ system consists of an electronic whiteboard to manage the patient traffic in A&E Departments to ensure compliance with the national target to treat, discharge, transfer or admit patients within four hours of arrival.
The Klok system displays a visual record of patient activity in real time, instantly showing A&E staff who needs attention, what tests have been ordered, results obtained, where to act to prevent breaches to waiting times, where bottlenecks may be forming, and the allocation of a doctor or clinician to a patient, together with their accompanying medical notes.
Because bed managers have access to the Klok system, the process of requesting and allocating beds becomes much more efficient.
All the information needed by A&E staff to make decisions is clearly and simply laid out, allowing real-time observation and intervention.
The patient tracking information (which can be displayed on a wall-mounted VDU screen, on satellite PCs, or used by PDAs and other mobile devices) links to the hospital’s Patient Administration System (PAS).
The Klok system consists of three parts:
The website provides five main features:
Klok has already helped the East and North Hertfordshire NHS Trust to substantially reduce the number of breaches in two of its three busy hospitals – Hertford County in Hertford and the Lister in Stevenage – with installation at the Queen Elizabeth II in Welwyn Garden City to follow.
If you would like to see Klok in action, the Trust is happy to show interested parties the live system. Alternatively, Blueberry also has a test system online, which can be accessed via a login (provided on request).
Now that the patient management system has been operational for some time at the Lister and QEII hospitals, the benefits are really starting to emerge. In fact, the staff who originally resisted the system now threaten death if it goes offline!
Teri-ann Grange I.T. Projects Manager East and North Hertfordshire NHS Trust