Mobile app supports child and adolescent care in Kanta-Häme, Finland
Image: Wellbeing services county of Kanta-Häme
The app has helped to improve patient safety and flow of information between professionals. “One of the best things about the app is that you can document the information while you are with the child,” says Mari Kesälä, Head Nurse.
Specialised healthcare for children in Kanta-Häme, region and wellbeing services county in the south-western part of Finland, has been centralised to the paediatric unit of Kanta-Häme Central Hospital, comprising all speciality fields and paediatric surgery. The unit also includes paediatric ward 3A that uses the Medanets app. The ward uses Medanets Observation values and Medanets Early Warning Score, which is based on Paediatric Early Warning Score (PEWS) formulae. The Medanets Medication solution has been in pilot use since May. The preliminary plan is to take Medanets Medication into production use in December.
The mobile app facilitates interaction with the children and young people
According to Mari Kesälä, Head Nurse, the mobile app supports child and adolescent care in in many ways. “One of the best things about the app is that we can document the information while we are with the child. Documenting the information on the phone is a nice way to engage the young patient into a discussion. Because children are often accompanied by a parent or a guardian, this makes the documentation of care visible also to the family. We tell them, for example, that the measurement results documented on the phone are sent to the doctor right away,” Kesälä says. “Today’s children and young people are all digital natives. They would be more surprised if we didn’t use a smartphone,” Kesälä points out.
The app can improve the child’s involvement in their care
The mobile app can also improve the child’s involvement in their own care. For this purpose, Kesälä has participated in developing a new VAS pain score feature for Medanets. The first version will be completed in early 2024. It enables the nurse to show the child an image of the VAS pain scale on the smartphone, illustrated with emoticons that represent different levels of pain. The images will help the child to describe their pain. The nurse always has the image with them on the Medanets app, and they do not have to carry paper pain scales with them. The organisations can choose the imagery for the scale.
Desired effects on patient safety
All in all, Kesälä thinks that the mobile app has improved patient safety and the reliability of information. Ensuring patient safety was also the reason for implementing the Medanets Medication feature. The Medanets app is one of the factors that improve patient safety in pharmacotherapy processes.
In Kesälä’s view, when the entire pharmacotherapy process is in order, the same information does not have to be documented twice, which minimises errors. “The effects on patient safety have been no less than perfect. We use pharmacotherapy adverse event notifications as the indicator. In the spring, we received a reversed notification stating that we had not recorded medication in the notes of the patients’ medical records. We had not, because documenting medication in the notes is not part of our operating model. The doctor prescribes the medication, the nurse programmes the administration schedule and documents the medication administration in the medication section of the Lifecare EHR via the Medanets app,” Kesälä says.
The foundation of the success is the pharmacotherapy process that has been specified in cooperation between different professionals. “Specifying the pharmacotherapy process together with the doctors was not hard at all here at the paediatric unit. Paediatric doctors are as meticulous as paediatric nurses, which means they prescribe the medicines carefully so that the nurses can programme the administration and make the administration entries correctly.”
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