To reduce the death rate at Queen Alexandra Hospital in Portsmouth (United Kingdom), staff at the facility chose to experiment with … a computer application on laptop.
If this solution seems a little light, it has already saved more than one life, even more than 400 according to the results of the study.
Launched in collaboration with The Learning Clinic, a company specializing in improving health, the laptop application automatically calculates data on the patient connected to the machine (blood pressure, oxygen level, pulse, … ), and inform the responsible personnel in the event of abnormal change in its physical characteristics. This then makes it possible to increase the speed of reaction of the medical staff in the event of a problem, since they will immediately know what to do.
Named VitalPAC, the app was first introduced at Queen Alexandra Hospital in 2005, then at University Hospital Coventry near Birmingham in 2007.
Using the mortality rates before the device was introduced, researchers at Portsmouth Hospital calculated that since the launch of the app until 2010, 397 fewer patients than expected are deceased at Queen Alexandra Hospital, as well as 372 at Coventry Hospital.
It would therefore be more than 350 lives that would have been saved by this App, the rate of mortality having fallen by about 15% since its use.
Avoid mistakes with paper data
“This is an excellent example of a well-designed IT solution with a happy ending,” said Professor A. Mohammed, co-author of the study published in the scientific journal BMJ Quality and Safety. “All of this has been done clinically, and designed to address human error, and encourage medical staff to take appropriate action. The result is an improvement in the quality of care. “
According to the authors of the study, one of the major causes of preventable death in hospital is to fail to identify and respond to the deteriorating state of health of the patient. The introduction of this application would then make it possible to avoid the errors currently made with the data on paper.
This new computer system is not, however, unanimous among the medical world. For Michael Adams, co-director of the School of Nursing at Birmingham City University (UK), the machine should not replace the nurse:
“I find it a little sad that nurses need a phone (or whatever electronic equipment) to tell them to call a doctor. We need to teach staff to spot the deterioration of the patient’s physical condition and how to act accordingly, […] without outside help. “
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