Nurse input key to mobile POC efforts

Virginia Commonwealth University Medical Center (VCU Medical Center) in Richmond, Va., knows it pays to involve nursing staff in the assessment and application of health IT. By actively engaging its nurses in the planning process, VCU Medical Center has transformed workflow to much higher levels of efficiency since opening a new, state-of-the-art facility in October 2008.

Despite being three times the size of its predecessor, the new critical care hospital needed to operate with the same number of nurse FTEs, meaning the new facility and its staff required advanced communication technologies to enable full clinical mobility, including comprehensive wireless coverage that would support the delivery of timely, efficient and safe critical care.

VCU Medical Center implemented a number of wireless and mobile solutions to meet the nurses' objectives, all integrated and delivered on the InnerWireless platform. Enhancements to Rauland Borg's nurse-call system have enabled nurses to be more responsive to patient needs, while the wireless voice over IP communications system from Ascom allows nurses to conduct faster, more direct communications with other care team members. The Emergin alarm management and automated event notification system from Philips Healthcare has boosted patient safety, not only by generating an alarm if vital signs deviate outside a set range, but by sending a text-based alert to the nurse's Ascom VoWLAN handset for quicker response.

The medical center's InnerWireless Horizon solution also accommodates the IntelliVue wireless medical telemetry system from Philips Healthcare. As a result, VCU Medical Center performs ambulatory patient monitoring in more than 50 percent of the care area. The clinical staff also uses more than 300 mobile computers on wheels to electronically collect and review clinical information from the hospital's Cerner HIS.

An independent study of the new Critical Care Hospital at VCU Medical Center--conducted by market research firm Spyglass Consulting Group--confirms the benefits of involving nursing staffs in the assessment and application of healthcare technologies. Ed Cantwell, president, CEO and chairman of InnerWireless, adds that more hospitals are taking VCU Medical Center's approach to ensure nurses take a stakeholder position when new wireless technologies are evaluated and deployed within a facility.