HP Labs and Lucile Packard Children's Hospital have developed a new real-time digital patient safety dashboard to improve patient care.
The patient status system turns lights on the dashboard to red, yellow or green which represents the level of urgency which aids medical staff to help prevent certain life-threatening complications in the intensive care unit (ICU).
The company said by reviewing the dashboard during daily rounds, physicians and nurses were alerted to life-saving procedures including ordering the removal of a central venous catheter that is at risk of infection, changing from intravenous to oral medication.
It also incuded decreasing the use of unnecessary laboratory testing, using only necessary sedatives, taking measures to prevent pressure ulcers (bed sores), changing the amount a patient’s head is elevated to prevent ventilator-acquired pneumonia and identifying overdue procedures that place the patient at risk of infection.
Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital Patient-Centered Dashboard project manager and Stanford University School of Medicine pediatrics clinical assistant professor Natalie Pageler said this pilot is a first step in translating the data they now have available in a hospital’s electronic medical record system into practical information that can guide clinical decision making at the bedside of every patient.