Walsall Hospitals NHS Trust Goes Live With Horizon Enterprise Visibility From Mckesson, UK

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Article Date: 28 May 2009 - 7:00 PDT

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Walsall Hospitals NHS Trust has 'gone-live' with Horizon Enterprise Visibility; a visual control system designed specifically for hospitals, from healthcare IT solutions and services specialists, McKesson. Via real-time access to patient information, Walsall will be using Horizon Enterprise Visibility to improve resource efficiency and bed utilisation to reduce costs and improve the quality of patient care.

This electronic whiteboard designed to sit at ward level across a hospital, replacing the current manual whiteboards, works by taking feeds from the hospital's disparate information systems and displaying patient flow information using colour-coded, time-stamped icons against a hospital floor plan. The information is displayed on large format LCD Screens and is highly intuitive. This allows staff to see at a glance when beds are free, who is waiting to be discharged, patient safety attributes and when imaging results, lab results and prescriptions are ready.

The proven benefits of Horizon Enterprise Visibility that Walsall Hospitals are looking to accomplish include a saving of one hour per nurse per shift per day. This is achieved by a saving of up to 7-10 phone calls and 3-4 wasted logins to various information systems per day.

Brigid Stacey, Chief Operating Officer, Walsall Hospitals NHS Trust, comments, "We decided that McKesson's Horizon Enterprise Visibility was the solution that would best match our needs, not least due to its already proven capabilities and benefits. We have every reason to believe that this solution will accelerate and underpin our efforts to ensure that we operate in a 'Lean' fashion and in step with The Productive Ward and Quality initiatives. Moreover, we expect to improve data quality on source systems by making our data visible in a collective fashion and in doing so reduce clinician dependence on nursing and support staff for information."

Stacey continues "Our initial implementation has focused on Bed Requests and Fulfilment from Unplanned Care to the wards. Since our implementation of Horizon Enterprise Visibility, the bed allocation process for our planned admissions has been expedited by up to 3 hours. The system is also broadcasting the status of radiology and pathology results, Bed Clean Requests and Patient Safety Attributes [e.g. Fall Risk, Nil by mouth, MRSA SWAB status], and utilising the timer device to alert staff to patients requiring bed turns. Our early experience of Horizon Enterprise Visibility is incredibly promising and our plans to incorporate RFID feeds for patient and equipment tracking and to take feeds from our remaining systems are on track to be realised in the near future."

Charmaine McDonald, UK Managing Director, comments: "By combining our industry-leading healthcare information technology and the scale of our business with unsurpassed clinical knowledge, we remain steadfast in our commitment to understanding the needs of the UK healthcare sector. Our customers are particularly aware of the benefits of working with a partner whose only business is healthcare, like McKesson. We are confident that visual controls will be recognised as the preferred method for driving and sustaining process improvement in the acute care setting and supporting the NHS with its initiatives such as Quality and Innovation and The Productive Ward. A single view of the acute environment that shows the status of every ward, the status of every bed and the location of every patient as they move throughout the hospital replaces a great amount of time-consuming communication, and dramatically improves efficiencies with immediate effects. And most importantly, visual controls that help clinicians to work more efficiently will ultimately result in improved service delivery and improved patient care."

Source
McKesson UK

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