Hospital at Night: Using mobile technology to deliver efficient and safe working
The Hospital at Night (H@N) is a multi-professional, multispecialty approach to delivering care at night and out of hours, with the aim of improving patient safety1. How can mobility enhance the process even further?
Centralised task coordination out of hours
The Hospital at Night process originated in England after the introduction of European working time directive in 2003, as a response to the pressure to reduce junior doctors’ working hours. The vision was to improve teamworking out of hours, expedite the review of sick patients and reorganise care.
. This was to be done by seeking a reduction in bleeps to medical junior doctors overnight, in a way that all patients had access to the right person with the right skills for their need at the right time. It was proposed that by using the collective available skills on site out of hours, would better support clinical care, improving patient outcomes and training for doctors.1
Task co-ordination forms the backbone of the H@N process between the hours of 20:00 and 08:00, when all tasks are routed via a Hospital at Night Coordinator. The Coordinator triages, prioritises and allocates tasks to a dedicated, multi-disciplinary team including nurse practitioners, health care assistants and junior doctors.
Mobility to enhance task management
Together with the hospital’s existing electronic health record, Medanets brings the H@N process to mobile. After claiming a role, task creation and coordination is possible in the Medanets app with the help of the Worklists feature. The feature allows creating custom order-driven lists for different user or occupational groups on mobile.
The different occupational groups can access their own worklists, containing only their role-specific tasks, on mobile. With the app, they can mark the task as accomplished or, for a justified reason, reassign the task to the H@N Coordinator.
The Medanets app will be used for task coordination for H@N alongside with other features complementing the Cerner Millennium EPR workflows. The new Medanets feature will be used for the first time by the County Durham and Darlington NHS Foundation Trust.
Sources:
- Saqib et al. (2021): Quality improvement report: setting up a hospital at night service, limitations of bleep filtering and using an electronic task management system. BMJ Open Quality.
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