Patient Discharge Management
Benefits
Simple implementation with minimal process changes
Thanks to the simplicity of our Discharge Management solution, existing hospital processes can remain unchanged for nurses and healthcare workers.
The standard wristband printer is replaced with an RFID wristband printer, which seamlessly links patient details to the tag without requiring any additional steps, as the printer performs this task automatically.
When a patient is discharged, the wristband is placed in a smart drop reader, which instantly updates the bed management system, eliminating the need for any manual data entry.
Why use RFID for Discharge Management?
In busy healthcare environments, it can take time for nursing staff or healthcare assistants to update the relevant systems to flag a bed up as ready for cleaning following a patient’s discharge from hospital. With typical times ranging from a few minutes to a few hours during busy times, this causes unnecessary delays for bed turnover.
With bed availability in acute hospitals often at critically low levels, this means that hundreds if not thousands of staff hours are taken up each year by making phone calls to wards to establish whether there are any free beds.
Expanding to patient flow tracking
To maximise the benefits of this solution, it can easily be expanded to track patient flow in the hospital. This means that the location of inpatients during their stay or movements of patients in outpatient departments can be monitored to improve staff efficiency and patient care.
How RFID improves bed turnaround
RFID wristband
On admission, an RFID wristband printer prints the patient wristband and automatically associates their details with the unique ID programmed into the chip of the wristband. Wristbands also show patient details and a barcode to ensure any existing processes can remain in place.
Patient discharge
When the patient is discharged, the RFID-enabled wristband is inserted into a specifically designed 'smart bin' or 'smart drop reader' which detects the ID of the wristband. Triggered by the new wristband, the smart drop reader, connected via a software interface, updates the bed management system.
Bed availability
In addition, an SMS message or email is sent to cleaning staff, alerting them that the bed is ready to be processed. Alternatively, a live dashboard on a screen can be updated with all beds ready to be cleaned.
Increasing efficiency
By automating the process of updating the bed management system, the time to flag up when a bed is ready for cleaning can be cut drastically by over 90% from minutes or hours to literally seconds. This ensures vital systems are kept up to date without delay and provides accurate data for analytics and forecasts.
The system also saves time by eliminating the need for nurses and other healthcare staff to manually update a bed management system which often takes them away from patient care tasks. Instead they simply place the patient wristband into the 'smart drop reader'.
Accurate data for analytics
Our discharge management solution can provide valuable analytics on bed availability. This can be particularly valuable for hospitals which use external cleaning contractors to ensure agreed KPIs for bed turnover are adhered to.
