Call for advanced IT in hospitals

 

Better use of information technology in England’s hospitals could help prevent 16,000 deaths a year, a report says.

University Hospitals Birmingham has recommended its system to the team investigating above-average death rates from 2005 to 2008 at Stafford Hospital.
The trust says it saw a 17% fall in deaths among emergency patients over 12 months, which would equate to 16,000 deaths prevented across England.
Systems include a computer reminding staff to give patients their drugs.



The trust says IT surveillance on its wards is backed up by a policy of holding staff to account for errors.

The report shows how the trust has harnessed IT to bear down on errors, with the initial focus on preventing missed medications. Evidence suggests that hospitals may miss one dose in every five.
Staff at the trust are issued with computer-generated reminders, and the system also issues warnings to prevent prescriptions which could harm the patient.

The number of medication errors at the trust has halved, which has coincided with a sharp fall in deaths for patients admitted as an emergency, the report says.
Missed medications are just one of many clinical activities that are monitored on University Hospitals Birmingham’s computer database, and presented to staff on the wards on a dashboard display.

It also includes falls, checks for blood-clots and infection control.
The system also generates alarms when staff key-in clinical information that could give cause for concern, such as changes to a patient’s temperature, heart rate, or blood pressure. This triggers an alert in the critical care Unit, prompting an outreach team to be dispatched to wherever they are needed in the hospital.
Where mistakes arise, the real-time feedback to senior executives enables them to call staff to account, with regular reviews to assess and explain performance.