Patient data: A Dublin hospital is believed to be the first in the State to begin computerising patient data literally at the patient's bedside.
Doctors tending patients on two surgical wards at Tallaght Hospital can now order tests and check patients' laboratory test results as they see them on their ward rounds.
The initiative, which it is hoped will be eventually extended throughout the hospital and the Irish healthcare system, has been modelled on a similar system in the US.
According to Prof Kevin Conlon, professor of surgery at Trinity College and a consultant in upper gastrointestinal surgery and surgical oncology at Tallaght Hospital, the new hand-held computers improve patient care and save on staff spending time going around the hospital looking for X-ray results, for example, or searching the library for the latest reference on how a particular condition should be treated.
"For sick patients we can have their results in real time which is tremendous in improving quality of care," he said.
The wireless computers, about the size of a paper back, are also fitted with security devices to ensure patient data is protected and the devices will not work if taken more than 150 feet from their base station.
"This is not an electronic patient record. It is using existing hospital computer infrastructure to make care of the patient more efficient and given the European Working Time Directive we clearly have to be more efficient in the way we deliver care," Prof Conlon said.
The computers also have links to hospital best practice guidelines and the hospital library, which is particularly beneficial to junior doctors who can use it as an educational tool. Furthermore, details of each patient's diagnosis and medication they are on can be accessed on the computer in "real" time. Such data is not normally input into computer systems until after patients have been discharged.
Prof Conlon said he was involved in the development of a computerised disease management system while working at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Centre in New York, the largest cancer centre in the world, and when he returned to Dublin he saw Tallaght Hospital had a sophisticated IT system which could be put to more use.With the back up of ERGO, a specialist provider of IT solutions, the hospital was able to do just that.
"The system also allows us improve communication with GPs. It allows us generate electronic discharge letters," he said.
There are five of the computers on each of the surgical wards and doctors tending to the patients in these wards take the computers with them to the patients' bedside and then return them to a specially designed cabinet on the wards afterwards.
Prof Conlon expects that in time nursing notes will also be included on the system, with nurses inputting details of a patients temperature and blood pressure as soon as they are taken. These are still recorded on a chart. "It shows what can be achieved when administration and clinical services work together," he said.