Exploitable results Help at hand for healthcare practitioners The inquest into the death of a 7-year-old who died of a brain tumour in a hospital in Birmingham, UK, opened on 12 May. Matthew Cooke's condition remained undiagnosed despite being seen by several different doctors. Three years ago a man died after having the wrong kidney removed in a British hospital; extreme examples of medical accidents that WARD IN HAND's system can help guard against. It is generally accepted that hundreds of thousands of less serious incidents happen every year across the world. The cause of these accidents can often be traced to human errors, despite numerous procedures that have been instigated to prevent them. Most of these procedures are paper based, and herein lies the problem - notes may get lost, are not up-to-date, or are unavailable when needed; forms may have been filled in incorrectly and so on. Developed with IST funding, WARD IN HAND has been successfully piloted in three hospitals in Italy, Spain and Germany. The system involves the use of hand-held, speech enabled, remote devices using a wireless LAN, directly linked to the patients' medical records. More than just record keeping This means that medical personnel have immediate access to all relevant information. In addition, whenever they prescribe a new treatment or procedure, they immediately input the new data into the device and the patient's records are instantaneously updated. Another ground-breaking innovative feature of WARD IN HAND is that it incorporates a work flow engine. Says Virtuoso: "In the healthcare field, when a procedure is prescribed, there is a rigid set of steps involving several different people and departments that must be followed to ensure quality and standards are maintained. For example if a doctor orders a blood test, the test must be booked, someone must take the blood, someone must label the container, someone must analyse the sample and record the results and so on. "WARD IN HAND 'remembers' the logical sequence that must be followed and ensures it is carried out properly by all personnel by adding it to their personal 'things to do' list. There are other hand-held systems around. But I do not know of any that incorporate this truly unique work flow feature." But WARD IN HAND is a lot more than accurate, comprehensive and rapid record keeping, as project manager Salvatore Virtuoso explains: "The less doctors have to transcribe on to bits of paper, the less room there is for errors. A hospital works around the clock, and the personnel change with each shift. Currently, staff frequently communicate through written notes, and this can lead to mistakes. "In addition, WARD IN HAND automatically checks any new information that is entered for consistency. For instance, it will check whether drugs or dosages prescribed seem inappropriate. If there is an inconsistency, it will flag it so the doctor can double check the decision." As well as reducing the possibility of potentially lethal mistakes, WARD IN HAND also dramatically improves efficiency, reducing the amount of time doctors spend on routine administrative tasks by a massive 30-40 per cent. Seeking commercial partnership Currently the WARD IN HAND consortium is looking for a medical institution to work with them in bringing the system into full operational use. "The system has been clinically validated in the pilots," says Virtuoso. "We have also demonstrated clear cost and time savings. What we need now is a commercial partnership with a hospital committed to deploying the system. This will take significant investment. At the moment, only two per cent of healthcare budgets are spent on IT - a tiny proportion. But this is set to rise to six per cent over the next three years or so. "There are also still legal issues to be resolved, such as those surrounding patient confidentiality, and electronic signing and storage. We are working on biometric authentication of users, based on things like retina readings, voice identification and finger prints." Meanwhile, there are certainly no doubts about the usefulness of the technology pioneered by the WARD IN HAND team as spin-off applications are now in everyday use. "When we first started in early 2000, the wireless LAN technology was very new," recalls Virtuoso. "People used portable terminals, but they were not connected online, and data had to be downloaded to the main system later. What we have gained through WARD IN HAND is a huge amount of know-how, which we are already exploiting. Similar systems are now in regular use in many commercial settings, such as utilities supply, warehousing and manufacturing." The consortium is already working on another IST project, MEMO, (www.med-mobile.org) which is a cluster project developing other applications of mobile computing in the healthcare field. Virtuoso is convinced that WARD IN HAND will bring fundamental improvements to healthcare. As he says: "Connectivity is essential to ensure productivity and quality. Doctors are mobile. Patients are mobile. So the answer is obviously mobile computing. Over the next ten years hundreds of these systems will be in use, revolutionising healthcare." Promoted by the IST Results Service Searching for OpenAIRE data... There was an error trying to search data from OpenAIRE No results available
