There is a fundamental challenge facing the healthcare industry right now – which is set to continue for the next two to three decades. That is: how to cope with ever-increasing patient numbers in the face of rising operational costs and on a reduced budget? The demand for healthcare services is dramatically increasing – due mainly to a growth in the senior population and the number of chronically ill patients requiring continued care. Yet there is a funding shortfall for those services.
To overcome this problem, hospitals need to do more with less. They need to increase both efficiency and productivity. Resources such as medical supplies, services, beds, new technologies and pharmaceuticals have to be utilised in a way that optimally balances costs to the provider and benefits to the patient. However, there are further challenges. Many governments are changing the regulatory framework of the healthcare industry, leading to a growth in consumer-driven healthcare where patients are viewed as customers.
As a result, healthcare organisations need to improve their service to appease patient satisfaction. They need to improve patient safety and quality of care. They need to improve efficiency of information flows, enabling access to the right information, at the right time, and to the right person. They need to reduce waiting and treatment times. Furthermore, there are internal issues to consider too, such as ensuring staff loyalty and satisfaction, and increasing productivity levels.
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By integrating and automating many day-to-day hospital processes, efficiency is improved, costs are reduced, patient satisfaction improves and a better level of care is achieved. CarePlus™ delivers!
Hospitals are trying to address the nursing shortage with smarter staffing levels, more flexible scheduling and higher salaries. But it is also necessary to reduce the time nurses spend on administration, paperwork and other indirect tasks and to increase the time they spend at their patients’ bedside. No single solution will immediately improve nurse recruitment and retention. However, better communications and easier access to relevant information can go a long way to addressing the issues that have aggravated the nursing shortage. Advanced nurse call systems provide the tools enabling performance improvement initiatives.
“Care Management and Information Systems” provides significant workflow productivity tools and benefits. Wireless telephony further supports the patient safety initiative of the named nurse convention, providing up significant efficiency dividends for each nurse for each shift.
Accompanying the workflow and efficiency dividends the Care Management and Information System also provides significant benefits from improved QA and patient safety. This is specially enabled by associating the efficiency dividend with more time for nurses to spend with patients, doing what they are trained to do – giving care. This care giving is proven to provide reductions in secondary infections like pneumonia and enhance the detection rates of MRSA and hence detecting and reacting to patients drifting off protocol, which leads to reductions in patient days further enhancing hospital efficiency.
The benefits of logging and recording patient / caregiver interactions provide a quick and simple way to prove to service providers, (Medicare, NHS, Medicaide, insurance companies, etc.) that a service has been provided and the appropriate rebates, payments should be made. It also enables caregivers from the next shift to quickly check automated events, which occurred during previous shifts, providing enhancements to patient safety and quality assurance. This type of data collection enables rich data mining, Business Intelligence and other reporting and forecasting tools to care givers and administrators throughout the hospital, advantages range from corporate dashboards to real time bed vacancy rates.
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The CarePlus™ Version 2 can be installed in a phased approach in specific care areas or wards and then scaled up to other clinical areas. The modular design enables the system to be installed around operational requirements and operational restrictions in specific care areas of the hospital, care area at a time. Additionally, features enabling various efficiency and safety initiatives can be customized (enabled or disabled) for each individual care area.
Available efficiency and improvement initiatives delivered by the “Care Management and Information System” (CMIS) include the following key result areas;
1. Reduce Costs
- a. Improved nursing efficiencies
- b. Improved patient safety
- c. Improve patient satisfaction
- d. Customisable workflow productivity per care area.
- e. Reduced risk of pressure ulcers
- f. Reduced risk of patient falls
2. Increase revenue
- a. Improved bed utilisation
- b. Improved reporting
- c. Improve QA and compliance for service providers (Medicare, NHS, Medicaide, insurance companies)
- d. Improved Return on Investment
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