Walsall first with Horizon Visibility

McKesson’s Horizon Enterprise Visibility patient monitoring system

Walsall Hospitals NHS Trust has become the first in the UK to go-live with McKesson’s new Horizon Enterprise Visibility patient monitoring system.

The trust says that the introduction of the system has helped improve bed allocation and help speed up planned admissions.

According to McKesson, Horizon Enterprise Visibility (HEV) is the industry’s first patient visibility system to allow nurses to access real-time information simultaneously, so that each staff member knows the status and whereabouts of every patient.

The trust began implementing HEV at the beginning of 2009 and went live with the system in less than four months.

Adrian Wookey, vice president of service delivery at McKesson, told E-Health Insider: “The implementation and go-live was very quick and successful. The system is now fully live across all wards and departments across Walsall Manor Hospital.”

The trust has used the system to replace its old manual patient whiteboards with large electronic notice boards. These work by taking feeds from the hospitals disparate information systems, such as clinical and admission discharge and transfer functionality of the hospital’s PAS system.

Patient information flow is then displayed using colour-coded, time-stamped icons against a hospital floor plan on the large LCD screens.

The new screens allow staff to easily identify when beds are free, who is waiting to be discharged, patient locations and when lab results and prescriptions re ready

Brigid Stacey, chief operating officer at Walsall Hospitals, said: “Our initial implementation has focused on bed requests and fulfilment from unplanned care to the wards. Since our implementation of Horizon Enterprise Visibility, the bed allocation process for our planned admissions has been expedited by up to three hours.”

Stacey added: “We have every reason to believe that this solution will accelerate and underpin our efforts to ensure that we operate in a lean fashion.”

Studies carried out in the US and Germany, where the system is already extensively used, showed that using the system can save each nurse up to an hour per shift, as they no longer need to spend time making phone calls to hand-over information.

The trust is also using the system to broadcast the status of radiology and pathology results, bed clean requests and critical safety information such as ‘nil by mouth’. The system is also using a timer device to alert staff when patients require bed turns.

The next stage of the project includes plans to incorporate RFID feeds for patient and equipment tracking.

Charmaine McDonald, UK managing director of McKesson, said: “We are confident that visual controls will be recognised as the preferred method for driving and sustaining process improvement in the acute care setting.

“A single view of the acute environment that shows the status of every ward, the status of every bed and the location of every patient as they move throughout the hospital replaces a great amount of time-consuming communication, and dramatically improves efficiencies with immediate effects.”

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McKesson launch whiteboard monitoring system