The Connected Hospital

My posts to date explain how EHR stored the data recorded by the physicians and other health providers, and how this data can be shared easily to other stakeholders. Clearly, EHR is the key example that illustrates how ICT can help a hospital to achieve a state called the connected hospital - a vision of a fully integrated hospital where wireless technology allows care givers and patients to roam throughout the hospital while providing accurate and timely monitoring. A lot of hospitals see this vision as the “promised land” of ICT integration. UCSF shares its vision of connected hospital in an amazing video here.

This video shows that ICT can do more than ensuring accurate patient records and enabling real time data analysis through EHR. In this post, I will elaborate two of many instances that UCSF mentioned.

Patient Survey

So a hospital has implemented the EHR system, in the hope of increasing patient satisfaction. However, how does it know that the patients are indeed satisfied? In my previous post about best practices, I shared how important it is to have an ICT optimization team in order to identify and implement improvement opportunities. Patients are evergreen source of innovative ideas if hospitals listen to what they say and probe for more. Furthermore, patients can also be the best source for identifying unsolved problems. Therefore, a patient survey is an important source of data set that a hospital should collect and analyze.

Evaluating a paper based survey, however, is very time and labor consuming. This fact makes hospitals limit the sample size and questions to a manageable amount. As a result, hospitals tend to miss a lot of information. ICT helps to solve this problem and enables e-Survey, as shown in this video.

Example of e-Survey Utilized in Hospital Setting

Brockton Hospital in Massachusetts has implemented this method. When about to leave the hospital, each patient is given an iPad so he / she can fill out a survey about his / her experience in the hospital. This e-survey allows a real time feedback and alerts the hospital management team whenever a patient rates the service as poor. This means the hospital supervisors can provide quick coaching and guidance to their staff as soon as possible.

Preventive Health Care

When we use our Nike+ FuelBand, we can extract data about our movements, activity levels, and calories burned. When we use Sleep Cycle application, we can monitor our sleep phase easily. When we use Diabetes Buddy application, we can track our blood sugar level actively.

What do these imply?

Just like what Dr. Bokser said in the UCSF video: “We are capturing data from the places we never imagined”. Having this data would help the hospitals and physicians to be more proactive on patient health and promote preventive medications. Cloud computing helps hospitals to bring this idea into a reality.

Example of Preventive Health Care Interface

Letting the physicians in the hospitals to track these data and diagnose the symptoms actively mean the hospitals would know something is going on even before the patients know about it. This will help the hospitals to control patient condition before it is getting worse. Controlling in the early stage means not only patients can be cured easier, but also hospitals can prevent a costly treatment. Therefore, don’t be surprised when someday the hospital suddenly calls you and tells you to see a physician / specialist as soon as possible.

That’s it for now! Stay tuned for the next post!