The health system worldwide faces challenges and unaddressed issues despite technological advancement. In hospitals, the struggles have revealed workforce shortages, a lack of consistent and efficient workflows, and an inability to adapt to rapidly evolving situations. 

There is an abundance of technological advances readily available to elevate the digitalisation in healthcare, aiming to revolutionise workplace operations and organisation processes. The post-pandemic has highlighted some of the current deficiencies of the dramatically important areas such as the intensive care unit (ICU).

Several obstacles can negatively affect ICU processes:

▪ Increasing complexity of care

▪ Ever-growing workloads

▪ Staff shortages

▪ Wasted capacity

▪ Workflow inefficiencies

▪ Excessive manual handling and direct contact with potentially infectious patients

▪ Situational awareness, training, and workflow adaptation

▪ Communication challenges/HCP interaction management

▪ Distractions, false alarms, and alarm fatigue

▪ Medical devices not interconnected

With these overlaying obstacles, how do you achieve a highly reliable ICU with digitalisation? 

The answer is an integrated digital data management and communication system that can solve the issues faced in ICUs. 

The systems should include the following capabilities:

▪ Workflow optimisation and task management

▪ Patient monitoring through medical wearables (blood pressure, ECG, biosensors, etc.)

▪ Medical Device Integration

▪ New communication technologies using smartphones to mobilise information

▪ Wall-mounted dashboards enhancing visibility

▪ Alarm technology/silent ICU

▪ Clinical decision support system (CDSS) based on early warning scoring and other relevant patient data

▪ Operational key performance indicator monitoring

An integrated patient data and communications management system can help at various strategic stages, from assisting with ceaseless improvement to prioritising and coordination. Digitalisation in healthcare doesn’t only serve as an analysis tool for the progress in monitoring errors, near misses, and changes happening during ICU operation. It also helps to drive the improvement process by supporting the workflow organisation and task administration.

With a CDSS and alarm filtering and prioritisation tools, the risk and set team responses can better be distinguished as the system helps with the decision-making processes. 

Contemporaneously, the remote communication capabilities of the system can help to ameliorate the coordination of response teams and the realisation of action protocols and constant learning, thus helping to relocate ICUs towards high reliability.

With the digitally driven continuous improvement of ICU processes and workflows, a reduction in error rates, and an improvement in staff performance, a high-reliability ICU can be achieved. Besides, an integral data and communications system, including alarm technology, integrated medical device data, remote patient monitoring, and a CDSS, along with efficient and rapid communication methods among medical staff, are key to achieving a high-reliability ICU.

Let us help you in your digitalisation journey by customising solutions to match your needs and digitalisation strategies, whether they are clinical decision support, medical device integration, alarm management, mobile devices and smartphones, or critical care and perioperative workflow management. Get in touch here.