AlexandraHospital is piloting a bed management system as part of a collaboration with Cisco Systems and Fujitsu Asia to address healthcare challenges such as bed shortages, the delivery of medical information and location monitoring of patients and hospital assets.
The pilot leverages on Cisco's Clinical Connection Suite (CCS), which comprises complementary components that help direct, locate and prioritise information for mobile clinicians.
The first component of the CCS that AlexandraHospital has implemented introduces a just-in-time approach to bed management that reduces waiting times for beds and increases efficiency in the utilisation of beds.
Liak Teng Kiat, chief executive officer of Alexandra Hospital said the adoption of technology can help healthcare institutions to reduce costs, add value through more efficient information processing, and address the issue of manpower shortage in this labour-intensive sector.
The bed management system, for example, enables a doctor to admit a patient and have the information automatically sent to service staff such as the nurses, housekeepers and porters via handheld devices such as the mobile phone or PDA. The service staff can then prepare the bed for the patient.
In the same way, the discharge of a patient will trigger off a workflow which will result in the bed being readied for the next patient. This greatly reduces the manual coordination effort required amongst the healthcare staff.
"It is our aim to get a patient who needs admission into a hospital bed within minutes rather than making him or her wait for hours," said Liak.
Systems integrator Fujitsu Asia has been working closely with the hospital staff to implement the CCS over the IP telephony and wireless network. Cisco and Fujitsu have invested about US$100,000 in the AlexandraHospital project to date.
The CCS is one of the first tangible business solutions that Cisco, together with its partners, has developed as part of the company's Connected Health vision, said Craig Gledhill, managing director, Singapore and Brunei, Cisco Systems.
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