2 page Case Study - Posted 10/6/2008

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Fundacio Salut Emporda

Hospital Boosts Patient Quality of Service, Legal Compliance with Mobile Solution

Fundacio Salut Emporda, a small hospital in Spain, needed to better manage its patient consent forms and comply with a government mandate to digitize its records. Using Windows Mobile® 6, PDAs, and a custom line-of-business (LOB) application, the hospital has created an efficient electronic forms process. Its customer service has improved, and staff can more easily comply legally. Now they are finding other innovative uses for Windows Mobile.

Business Needs

Located in Spain’s Catalonia region, Fundacio Salut Emporda is a small nonprofit hospital with 800 employees that prides itself on excellent quality of service for its patients. Like all hospitals in Spain, it must comply with a new government mandate requiring that all patient records become digitized within the next few years.

Fundacio Salut Emporda hoped that in the process of digitization, it could find a way to solve some problems that it was having in managing its patient-informed consent forms. “These are agreements that both a physician and a patient must sign before patients can be treated in our hospital,” says Fransesc Luque, the hospital’s IT Manager. The forms are legal documents that declare that the patient agrees to participate in treatment, and understands the implications involved. Once the consent form is signed, the physician is then able to access the patient’s clinical history and to proceed with treatment.

Staff must search for the consent form templates that are appropriate for each specific case and print them out. Patients and physicians sign them manually with a pen. Staff must verify the signatures on the forms, which is a time-consuming, cumbersome task. All this adds to the time that patients are waiting to be treated.

Fundacio Salut Emporda staff face an even bigger problem with archiving and retrieval. The hospital archives the forms in the old-fashioned way: in a file cabinet elsewhere in the hospital. “Fundacio Salut Emporda is a small hospital, without a lot of resources for archiving. With over 120,000 informed consent forms, the paperwork is quite hard to keep track of and takes a long time to retrieve,” says Luque. “Sometimes forms and records are misplaced. If we cannot find a document proving that the physician had permission to treat a patient, we could find ourselves in legal trouble.”

Solution

Fundacio Salut Emporda needed a wireless solution that would make the consent form process more efficient for its physicians, staff, and patients, as well as ensure compliance with the government mandate. The hospital also sought a better way to store and safeguard these documents.

"The doctors can spend less time finding paperwork and just focus on giving quality care to the patients." Francesc Luque IT Manager, Fundacio Salut Emporda

Using the Windows Mobile-powered PDAs, each specialist has wireless access to a menu of digitized consent form templates, and can view the correct group of forms they need. The physician and patients can then sign the forms electronically using a digital pen. The signature is stored in a digital image format such as BMP, TIFF, or JPG and automatically issued a digital ID certificate. The staff can then use their Windows Mobile device to authenticate the signature by comparing the digital image to one that they have on file, and forward the document to the digital archives for safekeeping using a wireless connection.

“Now, the patient can see the consent form and sign it right there at their bedside instead of waiting for paperwork,” Luque says.

Fundacio Salut Emporda started with two HP IPAQ 100 PDAs powered by Windows Mobile in early 2008, and plans to extend the solution to 16 devices by January 2009.

Benefits

Using the Windows Mobile–based line-of-business solution, Fundacio Salut Emporda has improved service for its patients and ensured legal compliance of a government mandate. In addition, the hospital has found that the solution has inspired creative responses to other challenges.

Improves Customer Service

As a nonprofit hospital, Fundacio Salut Emporda considers return on investment (ROI) in terms of customer service, not money. “The doctors can spend less time finding paperwork and just focus on giving quality care to the patients,” Luque says. “For the patients, it’s just easier to sign forms using the PDA by their bed.”

Helps Ensure Compliance

Using this solution, Fundacio Salut Emporda can better comply with legal requirements. “We can make sure all necessary forms are signed on time and that signatures areverified,” says Luque. “Staff do not have to spend time looking for the forms in the archives.” Better paperwork management helps doctors give quality care. “Doctors don’t have to be thinking about what the patient needs to sign because the forms they need are automatically handed to them on the mobile application,” Luque says.

Encourages Innovation

Fundacio Salut Emporda discovered other ways that a Windows Mobile–based LOB solution could help make its processes more efficient. It developed an application to manage patient meal menus. “Before, somebody would send the patient’s menu choice to the dietician to evaluate. The dietician would input it manually and route it to the kitchen, a time-consuming and error-prone process,” says Luque.

With PDAs running Windows Mobile at the bedside of patients, the dietician can now present menu options based on their health history, and use wireless access to transmit the choice to the kitchen. “There’s a lot more quality because dietary recommendations are made according to the patient’s needs,” Luque says.

The hospital is now partnering with Seidor to help its nurses manage data. “By September, the nurses will have a [Windows Mobile] PDA with them when they take the patient’s temperature and blood pressure,” Luque says. “They’ll be able to input the data directly and load patient clinical records on the spot.”