The 'Smart' Hospital of The Future

By Roland Piquepaille

In this article, the San Francisco Chronicle writes that "high-tech systems help improve quality of care" in hospitals. And it takes the El Camino Hospital in Mountain View, Calif., as an example. This hospital is completely wireless and hopes to become soon paperless and even filmless. For instance, its new computerized system to handle medications saves $300,000 a year by avoiding human errors. And when the hospital is rebuilt in 2008 to satisfy new seismic safety requirements, all rooms will have bedside PCs, giving patients access to their records.

The hospital, which is completely wireless, en route to becoming paperless and eventually filmless, is clearly an early adopter. Doctors and nurses wear a small, voice-activated wireless device around their necks to communicate with each other. Supply cabinets are opened with a biometric thumbprint reading.

Here is a photo of such a medical supply cabinet (Credit: Liz Hafalia, San Francisco Chronicle).

But this hospital, where doctors carry Tablet PCs and handheld devices, is an exception to the norm. The health care industry in general is not so advanced when it comes to IT.

A report published last summer in Health Affairs found that as of 2001, less than 10 percent of American hospitals had adopted computerized patient records and less than 5.percent had a computerized system to order medications, like the one at El Camino Hospital. And while U.S. health care providers spent more than $20.billion on IT, according to the report, most of it went to improve billing operations. Less than a third was devoted to hospital clinical systems.

Meanwhile, at El Camino Hospital, IT systems save money and reduce errors.

Officials at El Camino Hospital say that since its recent upgrades to their drug-ordering process, the number of times a pharmacist has intervened to prevent an error increased 250.percent between 2002 and 2003.

The hospital estimates the new system, made possible with software from Eclipsys Corp. and PeopleSoft Inc., has saved about $120,000 a year in drug costs from those interventions and as much as $300,000 a year in avoidable errors. The latter can include everything from spotting a potential dosage error to flagging the pharmacist to making sure the patient is taking the optimal combination of drugs.

The changes, which cost nearly $400,000, integrate the computerized system with the dispensing process using bar codes at the patient's bedside and thumbprint-reading devices to open supply cabinets. They also include a supply-replenishing system that automatically alerts the hospital's distributor when anything from needles to dressing kits runs low.

And what's next? A new hospital will be built during the next three years in order to meet seismic safety requirements. And the CEO of El Camino Hospital thinks it will be considered as the "smart hospital" of Silicon Valley.

The hospital will be equipped with bedside PCs that will offer patients access to their records and test results as well as the Internet and other entertainment.

Source: Victoria Colliver, San Francisco Chronicle, February 23, 2004