Dr Matthew Lewis (far right) takes part in an electronic board round with his team.Sandwell and West Birmingham hospitals NHS trust's established electronic bed management system (eBMS), which runs across its three acute hospitals, was expanded to help reduce bed-blocking and improve the quality of patient care.
The system can track a patient from admission to an acute medical unit until they are discharged to go home and keeps a log of the care they receive along the way.
Dr Matthew Lewis is the trust's group director for medicine and emergency care and a consultant in gastroenterology. He says: "At an individual patient level it's a single tool which enables us to co-ordinate the care we provide in different teams both inside and outside the hospital."
The eBMS, says Lewis, has become "the centrepiece of an electronic board round", where every day a ward's multi-disciplinary team will refer to the system to discuss a patient's progress and his or her readiness to go home.
The eBMS has other benefits too. "On a different level, it is also used as a way for us to look at the [bed] capacity issue. It means at any one time we can see whether we are on track or not," he says.
The eBMS has real-time operational dashboards, which track variations in patient flow, showing any reduction in length of stay, bed turnover intervals and delayed discharge. "The dashboards allow key staff to monitor at ward level any specific area of patient care during the inpatient stay which will cause a queue," says Lewis.
eBMS also includes 44 manual flags that can be applied to highlight a clinical patient alert and another 37 clinical alert flags are automatically triggered via electronic messaging from the hospital's other IT systems. These alerts are passed on to doctors via text, email, dashboard or bleep.
Lewis adds: "The combined functionality of patient-flow tracking, coupled with the many alerts and flags, enables the clinicians to have up-to-date information in real time to enable them to make informed clinical decisions quickly, that not only saves lives but improves the overall experience of patients during their inpatient stay."
This article is published by Guardian Professional. Join the Healthcare Professionals Network to receive regular emails and exclusive offers.
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