Cutting Costs By Streamlining Activities

An introduction:

With Chronic Health Issues On The Rise globally, health facilities are under the burden to meet the rising demand by investing in state of the art diagnostic and treatment equipment, as well as facility upgrades to accommodate the rising patient influx. Staff cuts are simply not an option when it comes to cost-saving strategies for modern medical facilities.

If anything, we need more nursing staff just to keep up…or (and this is the focus of this article) we need to somehow streamline nursing efficiency, maximizing patient care time and allowing our existing nurses to address more patients in a workday.

Today’s Hospitals

That’s because, in today’s hectic and bustling hospitals and clinics, nurses tend to be the primary caregivers, responsible for most of the one-on-one interaction taking place between patient and facility: the efficiency of nurses reflects directly on running costs and eventual turnover.

It’s nurses who deal with the constant flow of data capture and medicinal administration, as well as the patient examinations and treatments that simply can’t be personally undertaken by the limited number of medical doctors available.

The logistics of these time-consuming tasks are, for all intents, lost on the patient, whose foremost desire is usually in-person medical contact, a constant report for the voicing of concerns, the elucidation of their diverse and often complex conditions and possible solutions to their ailments.

So what to do?

There is a certain amount of one-on-one time that’s necessary to the effectiveness of patient consultation, examination, and treatment, so we can’t afford to cut back on patient-care time in order to allow nurses to see more patients, without putting our patients and our reputation at risk.
What we can do is implement one of the three most important Strategies For Cutting Costs (by increasing nurse efficiency) and that is automating and streamlining repetitive administrative tasks which currently take up 57 % of nurses’ time when they’re undertaken the old fashioned, hard way.
In nursing work environments where mobile workstations, mobile dispensing carts, mobile data capture ports are employed, on the other hand, not only do we see an increase in valuable one-on-one time per patient, but also in the number of patients who can be addressed in one day.
Implementation of our mobile solutions for specimen tracking, patient tracking, and the various daily nursing tasks means vast, measurable benefits for your hospital, clinic or medical facility, in terms of nurse efficiency, running costs, addressing staff shortage issues and patient backlog.

A Breakdown of daily nursing activities

Numerous studies have been undertaken that quantify nursing time expenditure and activities within the average medical facility on a daily basis. While specific tasks vary greatly depending on facility and ward specialties, the following breakdown of daily nursing activities in a surgical ward should suffice to give you the gist of it:

Fluid and tissue sampling
Sample tracking
Communication with patients and their families
Nurse’s professional activities
Preparing medication
Administering Medication
Transport of patient
Personal patient care and examination
Assistance with meals
Meetings
Education and guidance
Patient handover
Administration
Data capture
Patient tracking
Data retrieval

Those duties shown in bold represent periods that (in non-retrofitted, non-streamlined medical environments that employ static workstations) could be better spent on addressing more patients. Those duties, therefore, also represent money that could be better spent addressing more patients.

Real Solutions

Maximized one-on-one patient care time is directly associated with patient and staff satisfaction, a reduction in nurse error and safety risks, as well as an improvement in patient outcomes and the cutting of hospital running costs.

Patients who can see their advisor 80-100% of the time will end up spending less time in the hospital, not only will they leave more satisfied but they will also be clearing the room for a patient we may not have had the time to see otherwise.

We intend to provide you with real solutions to negative influences on nurse efficiency, as well as direct patient care time… such factors as:

Lack of layout flexibility, adaptability, and scalability
Inaccessibility of relevant data for patient tracking and specimens tracking
Data capture port out of range of the patient-care area
Lack of visibility of staff
Immobile dispensing stations
Nurse fatigue as a result of constant back and forth between static workstations and the patient-care area
Patient/nurse interruption and incident or complication risk brought on by the removal of workstations from then patient-care area

Our proposed solutions are as follows…

Kinetic Power

Static IT workstations in busy medical facilities are a thing of the inefficient past.

It goes without saying that unsightly and unsafe power chords and cables are far more trouble than they are worth, especially when data processing stations are placed on a mobile cart and cables stretched hazardously out across the floor. What good is a laptop or touchscreen and a mobile workstation, without an optimized mobile power source to keep it running efficiently?

That’s why we offer the Kinetic Power range of modular, medical-grade battery systems, for use with mobile carts, computer carts, hospital beds and any other electronic devices which might benefit from power-source portability and true mobilization…without hazardous and unsightly cable congestion.

Mobile printers, scanners, and nursing accessories

Barcode scanning, wristband, label, and sticker printing can take tens of valuable minutes out of the time your nurses are able to spend with each of their patients on a daily basis; not to mention the numerous interruptions experienced by nurses who have to trek from the patient-care area to a static printing or scanning station every time these tasks need doing.

Besides our range of scanners and printers which can be used in conjunction with our range of mobile medical carts and our Kinetic Power battery systems, we also offer entirely portable Bluetooth solutions to drastically minimize unnecessary away-time for your nurses and your patients.

Zebra ZQ610 & ZQ620

These include our Zebra ZQ610 and ZQ620 mobile printers, with superior battery capacities and wireless connectivity to improve nursing efficiency in ways you never thought possible, while dramatically diminishing or even eliminating incidents of failed co-ordination and incorrect administration of meds.

Consider the time saved by devices like our Zebra DS8100-HC handheld imager, which can capture 750000 barcodes on a single charge and will never get misplaced, thanks to a convenient paging button on the cradle.

Handheld computing and scanning solutions like our Zebra MC40-HC touch computer seriously streamline nursing activities for the maximization of patient care time by allowing for data capture, barcode scanning, and patient tracking right there at the patient’s bedside, without the need to even turn around!

That’s a solution to 5 out of the 7 negative influences on efficiency and patient care time listed earlier.

ID Mobile Carts

Our sleek and streamlining mobile medical carts are all about mobilizing nursing stations, where nurses spend approximately 57% of their time, keeping them in constant view of and contact with their patients…without losing any of the functionality or modular expandability of a static, traditional nursing station.

Our modular mobile carts are designed to meet a comprehensive range of nursing needs and when used in concert with our Kinetic Power solutions and our mobile administrative, printing and computing accessories, will foster environments that are streamlined, versatile, properly patient-focused and seriously stress relieving for both patients and medical center staff. That’s a solution to 7 out of 7 of the negative influences previously mentioned.

In Conclusion

Imagine the financial impact of not only automating repetitive tasks and as much as halving administration time but also of introducing mobile and visible nursing solutions that maximize patient care time and facilitate a faster path to patient satisfaction.

The adoption of mobile workstations and devices, with mobile solutions for data capture, specimen tracking, and patient tracking is one of the most effective strategies you can employ to increase caregiver efficiency and patient satisfaction, while drastically cutting your running costs, enough said!

Industry Insight