Coordinating daily activities and communicating with staff members can be quite a challenge within any hospital. Medication needs to be dispensed, X-rays need to be taken, and rooms need to be prepared for new patients. In fact, patient discharge and room preparation is one area that can be improved through real-time communication between administrators and members of the housekeeping staff.
When a patient is ready to be discharged, the floor administrator must alert the housekeeping staff, who, in turn, clean the room and alert the administrator when the room is ready. As simple as this process sounds, there are many moving parts involved, and the more efficiently the housekeeping staff can do their job, the easier it is for patients to get registered and settled into their rooms.
By Rob Goodman, Contributing Writer
Deploying a new wireless network and using smartphones have helped Cornwall Community Hospital improve internal communication, raise patient satisfaction, and elevate employee productivity.
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Coordinating daily activities and communicating with staff members can be quite a challenge within any hospital. Medication needs to be dispensed, X-rays need to be taken, and rooms need to be prepared for new patients. In fact, patient discharge and room preparation is one area that can be improved through real-time communication between administrators and members of the housekeeping staff.
When a patient is ready to be discharged, the floor administrator must alert the housekeeping staff, who, in turn, clean the room and alert the administrator when the room is ready. As simple as this process sounds, there are many moving parts involved, and the more efficiently the housekeeping staff can do their job, the easier it is for patients to get registered and settled into their rooms.
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For Cornwall Community Hospital (CCH), a 160-bed community hospital located in Cornwall, Ontario, the process of reducing bed turnaround time was greatly improved by implementing a wireless network to coordinate communications between administrators and the housekeeping staff.
Expansion Leads To Modernization
In 2011, CCH started building an 88,000-square-foot expansion. The existing facility was hardwired for networking and communication purposes, and at the time of the expansion, the facility was in the midst of a strategy to plan the move to a new EHR system. Realizing that a build-out would be an ideal time to deploy a wireless network, Mario Alibrando, director of information technology at CCH, decided to explore what options were available, and then he issued an RFP.
“We realized we needed a wireless network so we could start using wireless clinical applications, such as medication reconciliation, and devices,” explains Alibrando. “Not only were we interested in improving our bed management process, we wanted to modernize the facility as a whole.”
Finding A Wireless Partner
One of the key features CCH wanted in its new wireless network was scalability — it had to be able to grow along with the needs of the hospital. After speaking with three vendors, Alibrando selected Meru Networks to help drive the project. One of the first things Meru Networks did was a spectrum analysis to identify any interference issues so the network could be optimized for bandwidth. Alibrando already knew how much bandwidth each department needed by analyzing the data from the existing wired network. Next, the new system was piloted in one section of the building (a nursing care area) to test how it performed. Meru Networks deployed 10 to 15 802.11 N access points that provided 300-megabyte transfer rates prior to the next deployment, which included the 802.11 AC 1.3-gigabyte transfer rates.
Once the network was in place, Alibrando issued eight CAT B15 smartphones to a limited number of the housekeeping staff to test how the new network performed. Since the CAT smartphones are unlocked and are not limited to a specific wireless vendor, Alibrando ran a SIP (session initiation protocol) client over the wireless network that connected to the hospital’s PBX system. One of the reasons Alibrando selected the CAT smartphones is that they are rugged and waterproof, which is important since the housekeeping staff uses a lot of water and cleaning solutions when preparing a new patient’s room.
However, as with many new technology rollouts, one of the biggest challenges was getting the housekeeping staff to adopt the new technology. Many members of the staff had been doing their jobs the same way for many years and were reluctant to adopt the new system, either because they were set in their ways or weren’t comfortable with a new technology.
“When I approached the housekeeping staff about using the CAT smartphones, they were hesitant since many of them didn’t even use cell phones,” says Alibrando. “I decided that having a system where the staff member had to use their smartphone to go to a web portal, log in, and navigate the site would be too complicated. So I had the floor administrator send an email to housekeeping via the CAT smartphones when a room needed to be cleaned, and the housekeeping staff would acknowledge the request and reply when the room was ready.”
Making The Hospital Run More Efficiently
The staff at CCH has been using the wireless network since late 2013, and the feedback has been positive. Despite the housekeeping staff ’s initial hesitancy to use the new technology, they have found the wireless network and CAT smartphones to be easy to use, and the whole system has made the team operate more efficiently. In fact, the feedback has been so positive that Alibrando has issued about 70 phones to other departments including rehabilitation, medical reconciliation, and maintenance. When the IT team needed to take down the network for one day for two hours for maintenance, the housekeeping staff voiced their displeasure — in a nice way — since they’d become so accustomed to the new system.
As for the IT staff, the only issue that has caused a problem is that there are no Wi-Fi antennas in elevators, which means users lose reception there. Granted, all they need to do is call the person back when they step out of the elevator, but it’s a problem Alibrando is working to fix.
Wireless Communication Accelerates Room Prep
Whereas in the past it might have taken between 3 to 4 hours to turn over a room, using the wireless network has reduced that time to 56 minutes. “In the past, the administrator on the floor wouldn’t know if the housekeeping staff had been alerted that a room needed attention, nor would the administrator be notified in a timely manner when the room was finished,” says Alibrando. “Now, with the wireless network in place, all of the people involved in the bed turnover process are communicating in real time.”
In addition, one of the hidden gems of using a wireless network is that Alibrando and the IT team can analyze data that can shed light on ways to make the hospital run more efficiently. For example, in addition to tracking the amount of time it takes to prepare a room for a new patient, Alibrando can see patterns that help improve staffing needs.
"We use Anzer EMR Clinical Manager to manage the beds in each department, and when we examine the data that the application generates, we can see that certain doctors discharge patients at different times of the day depending on when they make their rounds,” says Alibrando. “We can identify what time of day we typically discharge a majority of our patients and when it’s pretty quiet. That helps us with housekeeping staffing and supplies needs.”
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Armed with anecdotal evidence from feedback given by the staff, Alibrando knows that deploying the wireless network and using smartphones has been a success for CCH. “To me it says a lot that other departments such as rehab and discharge planning have asked us to expand the network to include them,” said Alibrando. “In addition, one of our partners, Allied Health, which provides speech and occupational therapy services at CCH, is on the network so we can work as one team. The rollout has been so successful that we’re now using more than 100 smartphones throughout the hospital for clinical purposes and well over 400 devices for public use. But what I’m most happy about is that patients no longer have to wait in the hall while their room is being prepared. Getting them into their rooms quickly has raised the level of patient satisfaction and has made their entire experience at CCH more enjoyable.”
Coordinating daily activities and communicating with staff members can be quite a challenge within any hospital. Medication needs to be dispensed, X-rays need to be taken, and rooms need to be prepared for new patients. In fact, patient discharge and room preparation is one area that can be improved through real-time communication between administrators and members of the housekeeping staff.
For Cornwall Community Hospital (CCH), a 160-bed community hospital located in Cornwall, Ontario, the process of reducing bed turnaround time was greatly improved by implementing a wireless network to coordinate communications between administrators and the housekeeping staff.
Armed with anecdotal evidence from feedback given by the staff, Alibrando knows that deploying the wireless network and using smartphones has been a success for CCH. “To me it says a lot that other departments such as rehab and discharge planning have asked us to expand the network to include them,” said Alibrando. “In addition, one of our partners, Allied Health, which provides speech and occupational therapy services at CCH, is on the network so we can work as one team. The rollout has been so successful that we’re now using more than 100 smartphones throughout the hospital for clinical purposes and well over 400 devices for public use. But what I’m most happy about is that patients no longer have to wait in the hall while their room is being prepared. Getting them into their rooms quickly has raised the level of patient satisfaction and has made their entire experience at CCH more enjoyable.”
