King's picks McKesson whiteboard system

One of London’s largest hospital trusts is to scrap its manual whiteboards and install a real time room and patient visibility system from McKesson.

King’s College London Hospital NHS Foundation Trust is to install McKesson’s Horizon Enterprise Visibility, a visual control system designed specifically for hospitals, as part of its Releasing Time to Care: The Productive Ward programme.

This is an NHS Institute for Innovation Programme intended to help ward staff to streamline ward processes and to spend more time on direct care.

The HEV system will give King’s real time visibility of the availability of rooms, the location of patients, and their current status of a patient’s treatment. The trust hopes to roll it out in October, to improve bed management over the winter.

Simon Taylor, chief financial officer at King’s, said: “As well as showing centrally managed bed states in real time, HEV displays patient and ward information in a map that relates to the ward on the ground, rather than as a list or block diagram, making it very much easier for staff to see and use.

“The system is very intuitive, allowing staff to spend more time with patients, improving efficiency in hospital management and communication between staff, and ultimately improving the patient experience.”

The system has electronic whiteboards at ward level that take feeds from a hospital’s different information systems. They display patient flow information using colour-coded, time stamped icons against a hospital’s floor plan. The system also flags up patient safety issues, and the availability of imaging results, lab results and prescriptions.

Taylor said: “Once implemented, all staff will be able to access the right information at the right time without the need to log on to a computer in each instance. This will help us save time as well as providing staff with greater ward and patient knowledge, reducing waiting times and improving patient flow.”

Link: McKesson