Electronic Patient Record System
With a £30million investment over 10 years, the hospital undertook a huge transformation by bringing in a single electronic patient record (EPR) system across their entire estate. Facing the challenge of integrating the new EPR system into everyday life on hospital wards, they approached our team.
As Phillipa Winter, CIO at The Royal Bolton Hospital explains:
“Historically, all patient information was recorded on a whiteboard. This wasn’t secure and can easily be lost just by someone accidentally rubbing the information off. Using whiteboards was also a duplication of work, as a lot of the information is already in the EPR system. It’s important that staff have a visual aid to track the patient; where they are up to in their care, what they need moving forward, what referrals they’ve had and what type of assessment they had completed.”
After several trials with different technology, the hospital chose a 55” BENQ interactive collaboration screen with a built-in PC as the solution to support their EPR rollout across all 50 hospital wards. Brett Walmsley, CTO at the hospital, explains:
“The patient tracker screens would allow us to provide all the essential information that we use to manage patient care at a glance. We wanted to launch them at the same time as the EPR system so that everyone had access to this critical information. It then doesn’t matter where you are on the estate, or what device you use, patient information collected on the frontline is available in real-time.”
Commenting on the installation of the new interactive patient tracker screens Brett said:
“IDNS were phenomenal! Ward managers and Matrons can be particular about their areas, even our staff get pulled up from time to time. The installation engineers followed all the guidelines and all the safety requirements - they were simply superb. They also interacted with the staff in a professional and courteous manner, which goes a long way.”
Since completing the installation, the staff at Royal Bolton hospital have embraced the change, as Phillipa explains:
“Everyone has been great about the new technology. The best thing about the patient tracker screens being touch is if you do have a digitally immature workforce, it makes the new EPR system as simple as possible – that’s why the touchscreens were so key in the success of the rollout."
"We’ve now got staff taking initiative and using the screens as a digital whiteboard to make notes in meetings. We didn’t tell them to do that, they just worked it out themselves. They’re also shortcutting things by using the screens instead of their desktop computers, which saves them time and means they can provide more patient care – which ultimately is everybody’s end goal.”
