News
Digital pen and paper saves Portsmouth midwives £220,000 per year
9 March 2010
Portsmouth Hospital NHS Trust has transformed the way its
midwives take notes during consultations in the community through the
use of BlackBerry smartphones and electronic pen and paper technology.
The system has generated time savings equivalent to five full time
midwives and paid for itself in the first year.
The solution, supplied by PaperIQ and Research In Motion (RIM), the
maker of the Blackberry smartphone, enables the secure remote digital
notation of patient information and has saved the Trust an estimated
saving of over £220,000 a year.
The system allows Portsmouth Hospital NHS Trust (PHT) to
electronically transmit notes back to the hospital’s clinical system
using BlackBerry smartphones. The system is very popular with the nurses
as it does not hinder the patient consultation. When a nurse fills out
the form, the pen captures what is written and then automatically
encrypts and sends the data to the BlackBerry smartphone via Bluetooth,
which in turn sends the data to the maternity unit’s patient records
system.
Richard Sargent, ICT Change Control Specialist/Team Leader at PHT
said: “The traditional consultation process for the Trust was very paper
intensive and required midwives and nurses to record their activities on
paper forms when they visited patients’ homes. They then had to type up
the same details back at the office as the maternity records booklet
stays with the mother throughout the term of her pregnancy and post
natal care period.”
Due to the obvious inefficiencies of this system, the Trust had
considered providing electronic note-taking facilities with laptops
equipped with 3G cards, but the idea had encountered push back from the
carers as they felt that it would get in the way of patient care,
especially as the laptops had a short battery life and were cumbersome
to carry around.
Sargent continued: “By using the BlackBerry solution with PaperIQ, we
are eliminating the double entry of information as digital notes are
taken at the episode of care with the mother and then immediately and
securely transferred to the patient record system. This means that no
patient identifiable information is carried with the midwife whilst they
are in the community, which protects against information getting
mislaid, lost or stolen.
“By having patient records safely stored by the Trust, mothers are
reassured that if their physical records booklet is lost or becomes
damaged, their midwife can just request a new printed version of the
notes which would contain full details of the check-ups and care given.
The records system chronologically orders every episode of care together
with any notes that are taken in exactly the state they were recorded,
which is useful in case of litigation being brought against the Trust,”
added Sargent.
The solution has been deployed to 130 midwives in the community who
work across four hospitals and 320 different sites, and the BlackBerry
solution has provided a significant return on investment: “Now the
maternity department doesn’t have to wait for a midwife to return to the
hospital to input data and it’s captured and transmitted in real time,”
explains Sargent. “We have freed up ‘time to care’ equivalent to five
fulltime midwives. The BlackBerry solution with PaperIQ paid for itself
and began generating savings in the first year. In the second and third
years it’s all savings.”
Following the wider roll-out to the midwifery department, the Trust
is looking to pilot as a proof of concept to deploy the pens to the
hospital’s emergency department within the next couple of months. The
solution can also be used as a lone worker safety device, which offers
extra protection for midwifes in potentially dangerous situations.
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