Apple’s iTouch and iPhones connect nurses in Florida hospital
On any given day at Sarasota Memorial Healthcare System in Florida, the overhead page was going off every three minutes. And when a patient is in pain and trying to recover, that can be an issue.
So Sarasota Memorial brought peace and quiet—along with improved healthcare—to its hospital by supplying Apple’s iTouch to its nurses.
With help from Voalte, a startup developing point-of-care communications company that uses mobile technology, Sarasota began a 60-day pilot program in June where 25 iPod Touches were given to nurses on one specific floor with the goal of reducing the amount of noise and inefficiency involved in paging.
The iTouches reduced the number of pages in eight hours from 172 to 38, while the devices received an average of 4,000 messages a day—along with positive comments from the patients on the floor.
In a survey conducted by the IT department, Sarasota nurses rated their experience before and after the introduction of the devices. Prior to the administration of the devices, nurses rated their ability to find peers at 2.2 out of 4, and rated their effectiveness at 2.5 out of a possible 4. However, after using the devices and software, nurses rated their ability to find peers and their effectiveness at 3.4 out of a possible four.
The program was such a great success that Sarasota Memorial plans to distribute 100 Apple devices on a second nursing floor in December.
Are noisy, overhead pages a problem at your facility? Do you think this technology could be the answer?
Source: Information Week
About the Author: Sarah is an Editorial Assistant in the patient safety group at HCPro, Inc. She contributes to two monthly newsletters; Briefings on the Joint Commission and Briefings on Patient Safety, and manages four e-zines; Accreditation Connection, AHAP Staff Challenge, Nurse Manager Weekly, and Healthcare Training Weekly. She also helps research new products for the patient safety and nursing market. She graduated from the University of Connecticut in 2008 where she earned her bachelor's degree in English.
Tiffany Kucifer | Jan 4, 2010 | Reply
As a nurse manager and an iPhone owner, I think this is terrific. Ideally, I’d love to see a solution that allows the patient to contact their nurse directly (when appropriate) with canned phrases like “I need more pain medication” “I need to use the restoom” or other similar concerns. It seems that if used properly, and if nurses respond timely (building trust) that it could save time; a nurse would know immediately to send a PCA for a restroom request or could bring the scheduled pain med to the room when responding to the call, rather than making two trips.