By Tom Christodoulou, Sales Vice President of Australia and New Zealand, Zebra Technologies
As healthcare modernises, hospitals, clinics and ambulatory surgery centers are striving to fully digitalise and undergo intelligent automation. In Australia, the common belief is that hospitals spend between 1% and 1.5% of revenue on IT, which is lower than in other industries like utilities (3.31%), financial services (5%), manufacturing (3%) and telecommunications (4.2%).[1] While small IT solutions have been adopted, organisation-wide technologies are not as prevalent in healthcare when compared to other sectors[2]. So the question is whether there has been sufficient effort made to improve the quality, efficiency, and safety of patient care.
As pointed out by my colleague Wayne Miller, Director of EMEA Healthcare at Zebra Technologies, most healthcare systems have had their hands full over the last several months. They have been reviewing policies, procedures, processes, and systems to see if or how they facilitate or hinder real-time data capture, analysis, and more.
That said, many have started to accelerate planned technology implementations or scale already-deployed solutions to support additional use cases. But the speed at which change is needed continues to exceed the speed at which change is occurring.
The good news is that technology can be deployed right now to make an immediate impact across many healthcare functions. We have seen care teams mobilised and clinical workflows automated in record time to address some of the systemic issues exacerbated by the COVID-19 outbreak. Mobile technologies have been deployed in as little as days to help increase the efficiency and accuracy of patient intake and diagnostic actions, mitigate supplies shortages, and inform treatment decisions.
From these experiences, we’ve outlined some of the key ways in which the healthcare community can use technology to improve the management of its people, patients, assets, and facilities:
Technology For People Management
Many types of events that impact a large percentage of the population could impact hospital capacity and strain resources. Giving care team members clinical mobile computers that allow for real-time communication and collaboration with geographically dispersed colleagues via text, voice or other data-sharing tools helps “expand” staffing without having to hire more staff or overwork existing employees. These devices also help increase clinician efficiency by providing access to patient records at the point of care so they can be updated in real time without requiring a trip to a nurses’ station.
Giving patients a barcoded wristband upon admission ensures positive patient identification (PPID) during medication and treatment administration. It can also help with patient locating. The wristband can be scanned using a handheld mobile computer to automatically retrieve and update records with patients’ current locations every time they’re moved. Alternatively, radio frequency identification (RFID) tags could be affixed to the wristband for visibility by larger scale RFID or real-time location systems (RTLS) to verify patients’ locations. Other types of remote monitoring technologies, such as Internet of Things (IoT) thermometers, can be implemented to alert staff about urgent status changes and minimise direct contact with patients for routine vital checks. Artificial intelligence (AI) tools can help with remote triage to better direct patient care actions before they step into a facility.
So How Can Technology Help with Vaccine Management In Australia?
We know both practitioners and patients around the world are concerned about whether the cold chain will be maintained during massive COVID-19 vaccine distribution campaigns. But the truth is that all vaccines are temperature sensitive, as are several pharmaceutical products. That’s why best practices in temperature monitoring recommend multiple layers of temperature monitoring technologies depending on whether the assets will be transported on pallets or coolers and stored in refrigerators, freezers, or temperature-controlled rooms.
Manual reporting methods can only capture the temperature of an item at a particular point in time, but electronic data loggers can continuously monitor the environmental temperature and alert stakeholders to potential heat events so they can further investigate. Even better, temperature sensing labels can be applied to individual vaccine and prescription medication units (i.e., vials, bottles, boxes) to indicate to those administering the medication whether the proper temperature has been maintained all the way to the moment of injection or consumption.
Inventory management has also long been an issue that becomes easier to solve with the right labels and location tracking technologies, such as RFID readers and barcode scanning devices. If staff scan the packaging every time an item such as a mask, blood vial, medical device or medicine is used and input the quantity used, then inventory management system accuracy would automatically improve. This, in turn, helps improve utilisation of (and access to) consumables within a ward, hospital or entire healthcare system. These same technologies can be used to comply with government reporting requirements such as the European Union’s Falsified Medicines Directive or to report items nearing expiration to ensure prioritisation and prompt disposal if warranted. They also increase accountability to mitigate fraud and theft.
Having staff scan items every time they are used also enables synced back-end inventory reconciliation systems to alert procurement teams when supplies are running low and trigger automatic replenishment. This information can also help identify overstocks and minimise unnecessary purchases, improving profitability. At the same time, implementing RTLS, barcodes or even blockchain-based track and trace tools throughout the supply chain will help confirm an order status in real time. It can also be used to alert care team members if and when they may need to be more judicious in their use of supplies due to supply chain shortages or production and delivery delays.
In conclusion, the benefits of implementing new technologies across the healthcare sector are clear. However,the pain point isn’t the acceptance of these technologies. It is finding the time and resources to integrate them while allowing hospitals and practices to continue operating at 100% capacity.
To find out more about Zebra’s healthcare solutions, please visit here.
[1][1] https://www.publish.csiro.au/ah/pdf/AH000176
[2] Ibid.