Technology Target Studies: Technology Solutions to Make Patient Care Safer and More Efficient

Presents findings on technologies that could enhance care delivery, including patient records and medication processes; features and functionality nurses require, including tracking, interoperability, and hand-held capability; and best practices

RFID in Healthcare: A Six Sigma DMAIC and Simulation Case Study

Develop a business model to generate quantitative evidence of the benefits of implementing Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology limiting the scope to outpatient surgical processes in hospitals. Analysis showed significant estimated annual cost and time savings in carrying out patients’ surgical procedures with RFID technology implementation for the outpatient surgery processes in a hospital. This is largely due to elimination of both the non-value added activities of locating supplies and equipment and also the elimination of the “return” loop created by preventable post-operative infections. Several poka-yokes developed using RFID technology were identified to eliminate those two issues, as well as, for improving the safety of the patient and cost effectiveness of the operation to ensure the success of the outpatient surgical process. Several poka-yokes developed using RFID technology were identified for improving the safety of the patient and cost effectiveness of the operation to ensure the success of the outpatient surgical process

Early Information Access to Alleviate Emergency Department Congestion

Alleviating Emergency Department (ED) congestion results in shorter hospital stay which not only reduces the cost of medical procedure but also increase the hospital performance. Length of patient stay is used to determine the hospital performance. Organization Information Processing (OIPT) Theory is used to explain the impact of information access and availability on the information processing need and ability of a hospital. Technical devices such as RFID that works as “Auto Identification tags” is suggested to increase the information availability as well as the information processing capability of the hospitals. This study suggests that the OIPT needs to be further broken down into its entity form and then the impact of these entities is measured separately. On the other hand, institutional factors such as employee behavior towards the new technology is studied to analyze the impact of human factors in the implementation of these technical devices in the ED procedures. It can be implied from this study that early information access does increase the use of supporting EMR implementation. However, the importance of the use of EMR decreases with time on hospital performance. Moreover, other factors such as management policies related to IT positively moderates the relationship between information availability and the processing capability of a hospital ED

Use of location data for the surveillance, analysis, and optimization of clinical processes

Thesis (S.M.)--Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology, 2006.Includes bibliographical references (leaves 33-35).Location tracking systems in healthcare produce a wealth of data applicable across many aspects of care and management. However, since dedicated location tracking systems, such as the oft mentioned RFID tracking system, are still sparsely deployed, a number of other data sources may be utilized to serve as a proxy for physical location, such as barcodes and manual timestamp entry, and may be better suited to indicate progress through clinical workflows. INCOMING!, a web-based platform that monitors and tracks patient progress from the operating room to the post-anesthesia care unit (PACU), is one such system that utilizes manual timestamps routinely entered as standard process of care in the operating room in order to track a patient's progress through the post-operative period. This integrated real time system facilitates patient flow between the PACU and the surgical ward and eases PACU workload by reducing the effort of discharging patients.(cont.) We have also developed a larger-scale integrated system for perioperative processes that integrates perioperative data from anesthesia and surgical devices and operating room (OR) / hospital information systems, and projects the real-time integrated data as a single, unified, easy to visualize display. The need to optimize perioperative throughput creates a demand for integration of the datastreams and for timely data presentation. The system provides improved context-sensitive information display, improved real-time monitoring of physiological data, real-time access to readiness information, and improved workflow management. These systems provide improved data access and utilization, providing context-aware applications in healthcare that are aware of a user's location, environment, needs, and goals.by Mark A. Meyer.S.M

A Simulation Based Study in a Hospital Emergency Department: Capacity and Workflow Issues

Emergency departments’ capacities to deal with a patient surge (the number of patients increases in a short period of time) play an important role in preparedness for natural or man-made disasters. This paper examines how emergency departments could improve their capacities by optimizing the workflow. A framework is proposed to reconfigure the workflow to improve capacity while maintaining treatment equality. Our results show that reducing lower priority processes and combining originally separate processes can shorten patient total waiting time in the emergency department