Towards a Digital Lean Hospital: Concept for a Digital Patient Board and Its Integration with a Hospital Information System.

Lean management applied to healthcare aims at creating maximum value for patients by reducing waste and waits. It puts the patient's needs center stage, emphasizes employee involvement and continuous improvement. To realize this, visual tools such as the huddle board or the patient board are implemented in hospital wards. The boards are currently realized by whiteboards or flipcharts, which leads to duplicated data entries and loss of information. The objective of this work is to introduce a concept for digitalizing the patient board and integrate with a hospital information system (HIS) for improved data availability. Data on appointments, personnel planning and master patient data can be directly accessed from the HIS database. A digital patient board has several benefits: data can be collected from information systems, making it obsolete to record information several times. Even more functionalities, in particular, those supporting the communication between a patient and a healthcare team can be included by means of a digital board which improves patient involvement

Dynamic Pocket Card for Implementing ISBAR in Shift Handover Communication.

A risk factor for patient safety are communication failures among health professionals. Communication standards such as SBAR or ISBAR (situation, background, assessment, recommendation) aim at improving the exchange of information between health professionals by specifying a certain structure and content of information. However, those tools are not well established in daily clinical practice and IT support is missing which results in unstructured, inefficient and error prone information exchange. In this paper, we address this issue by presenting a mobile application that implements the ISBAR communication standard for the intensive care unit (ICU). The system can serve as digital pocket card supporting nurses in preparation for reporting and in a structured information provision during shift handover and in daily reporting. We collected requirements in collaboration with a hospital and developed a prototype. Within the application, nurses can take notes on the five information categories of ISBAR, which allows to reproduce the information in reporting situations in a structured manner. In future, it will be assessed in a pilot phase whether the digital pocket card is suitable for everyday clinical use