Housekeeping and transport staff play an important role in patient experience and hospital success. But these incredibly hard-working people are often overlooked when it comes to equipping them with the latest technologies that increase efficiency.
Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre, home to Canada's largest trauma center, is one of the first hospitals to adopt the mobile app for Allscripts Patient Flow®. The mobile application was designed specifically for housekeepers and transporters, enabling them to receive jobs and make status updates on the go.
For these teams, the most significant change was upgrading from using pagers and Interactive Voice Response (IVR) systems to a mobile application where users can respond immediately.
Transport dispatchers can send direct messages for effective, real-time communication. “Now the message is coming in and I don't have to go searching for the phone. I can complete the job right on the spot,” Patient Transporter Mart Tambuyat said.
Transporters have responded favorably to the mobile solution. “The app is a good thing. It's much faster to clear information from the patient and to finish orders,” Patient Transporter Rindy Chow said. Transporters can put the job in progress and mark it complete from the app.
The mobile solution provides accurate, real-time data that lets Sunnybrook know how patients are moving through the hospital. “We know how long it takes for a transport job, what our occupancy is, how long for a bed to be cleaned…we can narrow in on ways to make things work better for everyone,” Clinical Analyst Lisa Campbell said.
Sunnybrook has seen a solid improvement in the median time saved from transport jobs “assigned” to “in-progress.” Since going live, the compliance rate of marking jobs “in progress” has increased from 49% to 73%. “Patients may not notice the 10-second difference on each job, but when you add the time up, it saves more than 40 hours each month,” Campbell said. “These results are very promising.”
A recent case study details Sunnybrook's journey with Patient Flow in relation to hospital housekeeping and transport staff.
