Call system gets real about real-time info
Call system gets real about real-time info
Data indicate how well medical center meets needs
Patients at Grant Medical Center in Columbus, OH, no longer have to call for a nurse if they want something extra to eat. And the nurses know what patients need before ever arriving in their rooms.
Patient services at Grant have become more efficient by using a patient call system. When a patient pushes a button and makes a request, the request is answered by a central operator. The operator routes the request through an alpha paging system to the pager of a person in the appropriate department. A request for a blanket, for example, might be sent to someone in housekeeping.
The person who fulfills the request wears an infrared marker. When the person enters the patient’s room, the marker closes out the request. It also time-stamps the request, from the moment it was received to the moment it was fulfilled. Grant plans on using this system for functions such as delivering food, answering nursing and medication requests, dispatching escorts, and issuing work orders for facilities.
"For us, this is mostly a process management tool to give us information that we share with our staff," says Dan Loch, vice president of general services at Grant. "We ask that given the data [generated by this system], what can we do to improve our service to patients in these departments?"
A journey to improve services
Before implementing this system, Loch says the medical center had begun a journey of trying to improve its services for patients and nursing units.
"[We asked], How can we better serve patients directly and how can we better serve nursing units?’ It was a process redesign where we were trying to achieve organizational results in terms of customer service and quality work life," he says.
Grant wanted to reduce the times that staff were disrupted with tasks that were not their responsibility or with accidental calls. The medical center considered different ways of achieving its goal.
"We looked at outsourcing," Loch says. "We looked at other software structures." Grant then chose the system offered by LifeCom in Huntsville, AL.
"The search wasn’t a technology journey," he explains. "It was a redesign of our processes to better meet customer needs and our work force needs. We found that technology would help us do that based on our goals."
Grant placed the system’s central response center in the basement, and went live with one floor using the system last spring. The center has two terminals that answer patient requests; one or two people man the terminals at any given time. Grant has been adding other pieces of the system since the spring, and has planned to have it all in place — and serving the entire facility — by early October.
Although the system can track the response time to one patient request, it can also initiate a series of events. For example, the system can dispatch an escort for a patient. Once the escort takes the patient for a discharge, the system automatically dispatches a housekeeper. After cleaning the room, the housekeeper closes out the request and shows the bed clean and room available for the next patient.
Like the housekeeper, every employee in the hospital can access the system through its touchscreen capability. When employees make their own requests, the screen tells them who has been paged and, eventually, who responded to their requests.
Patients appreciate the personal side of the system — having a voice immediately respond when they push the call button. One patient at Grant became concerned when her defibrillator went off twice one night. She pushed the button and spoke to an operator, who sees the patient’s location and name on the screen, and is taught to address the patient by name. In previous hospital visits, the patient would call for a nurse and not know when one would respond.
Patients, however, aren’t aware of the improved service they receive through the evaluation of the data tracked by the system. "It gives you real-time information on service levels; it is a vehicle for empowering our staff to meet customer needs," Loch says.
Although the system does track the time it takes for the nursing staff to respond to patient requests, the information is not used to evaluate those employees, he stresses. "We do not use it at all for any type of employee tracking or employee performance."
Instead, the system is geared toward gathering information on how well the medical center is meeting customer needs, Loch says.
"The system looks at the hospital as a whole or unit in time of day, day of week, and how well it delivers [a particular service]," says William J. Simpson, CEO of LifeCom.
A big concern in the clinical side of care is how long a patient should have to endure pain before receiving the requested pain medication, Simpson says. "By tracking the care delivery process — and we are tracking process and not people — we are able to come up with an indication of that time."
The medical center decides how long each type of request should take to process, and then looks at the data to see how well those standards are being met. "We take this information, and adjust our processes to see how we can make improvements," Loch says.
The system also allows Grant to track supply and demand. For example, data from the system may show that green beans are the most requested food item. In addition, the system could show Grant employees which meals should not be delivered because patients are away from their rooms.
"You could look at how many [food] trays you prepare, how you actually distribute them, and how you could save money in this area," says Don Bryan, vice president of marketing and operations for LifeCom.
Still, nurses designed that system for nursing services, Bryan adds. The company hopes in the future to be able to take data from the system and integrate them with quality indicators to see what impact the system has on patient and staff satisfaction.
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