.KEYWORD story
.FLYINGHEAD PALM IN THE REAL WORLD
.TITLE Kaiser Permanente patient handling teams get a lift from Palm handhelds
.OTHER
.SUMMARY Kaiser Permanente is one of a growing number of healthcare organizations using Palm handhelds to cut costs, eliminate paperwork, and improve patient care. Christine Harland Williams will show you why their simple handheld application demonstrates how organizations can start small when it comes to using handheld technology and still realize significant benefits and ROI.
.AUTHOR Christine Harland Williams
Kaiser Permanente’s South Sacramento Medical Center in Sacramento, California, part of the nation’s largest non-profit health care system, is one of a growing number of healthcare organizations using Palm handhelds to cut costs, eliminate paperwork and improve patient care. Their simple handheld application demonstrates how organizations can start small when it comes to using handheld technology and still realize significant benefits and ROI (Return on Investment). These small steps provide a comfortable way for organizations to experience the development and deployment of handheld technology so that they are ready when more complex handheld solutions are needed.
.H1 Background
In the case of Kaiser Permanente’s South Sacramento Medical Center, a serious problem triggered the first handheld solution. Workers Compensation costs were reaching unprecedented levels within the organization, largely due to injuries suffered during the manual lifting and transferring of patients by nursing staff.
.CALLOUT The investment in development and hardware achieved payback in only four weeks.
To solve the problem, the EH&S (Environmental Health & Safety) office assembled an injury prevention task force to find new ways to reduce patient handling injuries. By May 2001, a two-person patient handling team was hired to perform the handling and transfers of patients for the nursing units Monday through Friday, between 6 a.m. and 4 p.m. The team made frequent rounds and coordinated with staff to perform scheduled lifts, as well as to respond to pages throughout the hospital calling them to handle patients exceeding a certain weight, or who were fatigued, comatose, quadriplegic, or paraplegic. They also responded to any emergency situations involving combative or resistant patients.
.H1 Mountains of paperwork
In order for the injury prevention task force to oversee the success of the handling team program, the patient handlers recorded each patient handling intervention on a handwritten log. This daily log was designed to track such facts as the time the team was paged, the time it responded to the page, the patient’s location, the type of lift, the equipment utilized, and any special circumstances.
"With the team averaging 40 lifts per day, writing the details of each incident slowed the team’s ability to respond to requests," explained Mr. Steven Gerigk, EH&S manager at Kaiser Permanente South Sacramento Medical Center.
The EH&S office wanted to optimize the patient handling team’s availability and efficiency and eliminate the administrative costs associated with keying the daily log information into a central database. This data entry cost averaged approximately $200 per week based upon an average of 800 lifts per month recorded into the system.
.H1 A simple Palm handheld solution
The EH&S office began searching for a simple and economical way to track lift data, looking at various mobile data collection programs compatible with Palm OS and Microsoft Access.
By June 2001, the EH&S office at the South Sacramento Medical Center deployed Palm Vx handhelds running a forms application created with Pendragon Forms, Version 3.1 (by Pendragon Software Corporation at http://www.pendragonsoftware.com).
"We chose to use the Palm Vx because Palm Powered handhelds are the standard across Kaiser Permanente and offered the right mix of simplicity and functionality," said Gerigk. "Pendragon Forms was selected because it offered a user-friendly way to create a log form on the Palm handheld that could sync with an Access database."
.H1 How it works
Today, the patient handling team captures lift information on the Palm Vx throughout the day as tasks are performed. By creating pull-down menus, general responses can be collected easily with just a few screen taps, allowing the team to capture lift information quickly and accurately, as shown in Figure A.
.FIG A Patient and lift information is captured easily using the electronic form programmed with Pendragon Forms.
At the end of each shift, the team performs a HotSync operation between the Palm handheld and the PC in the EH&S office that holds the Access database. With a quick synchronization, information for reporting and tracking purposes is updated in minutes. Hours of data entry are no longer required.
.H1 Simple solution offers substantial returns
The lift team’s handheld solution has produced a savings of $200 per week in data entry expenses for Kaiser Permanente South Sacramento Medical Center, and similar savings are expected at the other two Sacramento facilities now implementing the solution. This means that the investment in development and hardware made by Kaiser Permanente South Sacramento Medical Center achieved payback in only four weeks.
"The lift team members can record lift information on the Palm handheld and download it into the Access database so quickly that the lift team spends less time recording information and more time providing patient care," Gerigk said. "The handheld solution has also improved the accuracy of lift log information by eliminating handwriting issues. And it has accelerated the availability of that information to those who need it."
The application has enabled the lift team to identify peak periods for various kinds of lift requests. This has helped the center shift the schedules of its lift team to better meet patient needs.
The handheld application has also made it easier for the hospital to see what patient handling equipment it uses most, like the equipment shown in Figure B.
.FIGPAIR B The lift team has greater visibility into how patient-handling equipment is used thanks to the lift data captured on Palm handhelds.
Considering that the hospital recently invested $60,000 in dedicated patient handling equipment, having information that identifies the most useful equipment will help guide future equipment investments at this and other Kaiser Permanente facilities.
Eventually, the lift information collected with the handhelds will be studied to see how patient handling contributes to the clinical outcomes of a patient in an effort to identify how patient care can be improved through patient handling.
.H1 Looking ahead
The lift team handheld application is so helpful that the two other Kaiser Permanente facilities in Sacramento Valley are currently deploying the solution (at the Morse Avenue and Roseville facilities). Kaiser Permanente is recommending that the solution be used by any Kaiser Permanente facility implementing a lift team in the future.
Like so many organizations that implement Palm handheld technology, Kaiser Permanente South Sacramento Medical Center’s EH&S office has already found other ways handhelds can make a difference. The EH&S office plans to develop a second Palm handheld application to provide mobile data collection capabilities for on-site inspections and assessing employee knowledge.
.BEGIN_SIDEBAR
.H1 Product availability and resources
For more information about Pendragon Software, visit http://www.pendragonsoftware.com.
For more information about Kaiser Permanente, visit http://www.kaiserpermanente.org.
For more information on Palm handhelds, visit http://www.palm.com.
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