The Paperless Hospital?
26th Oct 2009
“Launched in 2001, E-Health Insider, E-Health Media's flagship title, has become the leading UK portal dedicated to the UK healthcare IM&T community. Delivering daily independent, news, comment and analysis, E-Health Insider has positioned itself as the trusted source of up-to-date information about developments, reaching an audience of senior managers and influencers within this sector.” They recently held their yearly awards, sponsored by BT. I’m always interested to see how the healthcare sector are using the latest technologies to improve individual patient care, while reducing costs.
Working with IT giants like HP and Microsoft, I’m keen to see how the introduction of wireless, mobile broadband, cloud services, tablet PCs, netbooks, and more, have allowed these guys to innovate with some great applications of the latest technology. This year’s winner for Product Innovation looked at how patient case notes were recorded and tracked, so it’s a pretty good area where loads of IT could help. My first assumption would be to reduce the amount of paper, as we all know that paper costs money and is very manual and labour intensive. Maybe capturing notes on a tablet, which sync’s to a cloud-based database to give everyone instant access to critical information could be the answer. Maybe RFID tagging a patient, so with a scanner attached to my handheld I could pull up that data and with an attached monitoring device it could record all the relevant patient readings, so I can get a recent history of blood pressures etc. Maybe the first step towards a true paperless hospital, with integrated systems?
But alas, no. £220,000 of tax payers money and... drum roll please... the winner for the Product Innovation award was MCP Systems Consultants and Walsall Hospitals' NHS Trust for the deployment of the 3M RFID case note tracking system. Which is essentially keeping all the paper, but sticking an RFID tag to each case note so you track down its location. So making each piece of paper more expensive, and time consuming.
Genius.
Published by
Jason Burrows, Managing Director
jason@creationagency.com, 07764 898000
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