“No patient should spend more than 4 hours waiting in A&E departments - from
arrival to admission, transfer or discharge”
- NHS Plan for England
Blueberry has helped develop an A&E Patient Monitoring System, called Klok,
for the East and North Hertfordshire NHS Trust which is being recommended by
the Trust for supply to other A&E departments in the UK.
The Klok system consists of an electronic whiteboard to manage the patient
traffic in A&E Departments to ensure compliance with the national target to
treat, discharge, transfer or admit patients within four hours of arrival.
The Klok system displays a visual record of patient activity in real time,
showing A&E staff instantly who needs attention, what tests have been
ordered, results obtained, where to act to prevent breeches to waiting times,
where bottlenecks may be forming, and the allocation of a doctor or clinician
to a patient, together with their accompanying medical notes.
Because bed managers can also see the Klok system, the process of requesting
and allocating beds becomes much more efficient.
All the information needed by A&E staff to make decisions is clearly and
simply laid out, allowing real-time observation and intervention.
The patient tracking information (which can be displayed on a wall-mounted VDU
screen, on satellite PCs, or used by PDAs and other mobile devices) links to
the hospital’s Patient Administration System (PAS).
The Klok system consists of three parts:
-
An interface to the Patients Administration System (PAS).
This interface can accept data from the PAS and automatically stores it in the
Klok patient database.
-
A Klok patient database.
Patient details from the PAS are stored in this database along with subsequent
comments and modifications by the A&E staff.
-
An interface for A&E staff via a website.
The website provides five main features:
-
A “Whiteboard” display which shows all the patients in the department along
with details such as name, time arrived, doctor etc. A colour coded display is
used so that staff can quickly identify how long each patient has been waiting
and if a breach is likely.
-
A “Desktop” display which is used to edit patient details and to transfer
patients between areas within the A&E department.
-
A “Medical Records” feature which is used to automate the requests for
patients’ medical details.
-
Administration screens which are used to define system parameters such as
doctors' names, department names, user logins etc.
-
A reports area which allows a user to generate reports on the number of
patients who exceeded the 4 hour wait time, plus a summary of the doctor’s
workload.
Klok has already helped the East and North Hertfordshire NHS Trust to
substantially reduce the number of breaches in two of its three busy hospitals
- Hertford County in Hertford and the Lister in Stevenage – with installation
at the Queen Elizabeth II in Welwyn Garden City to follow.
If you would like to see Klok in action, the Trust is happy to show interested
parties the live system. Alternatively, Blueberry also has a test system
online, which can be accessed via a login (provided on request).
For further details, please contact Robert Smith:
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