Courtesy of InsideToronto.com
Staff at Humber River Hospital will soon be able to tell when a bed is free, if an area needs cleaning, or there is a delay in patient care.
North America’s first fully digital hospital will open its state-of-the-art, digitally-advanced Command Centre which uses complex algorithms, predictive analytics, and engineering to target improved clinical, operational and patient outcomes, Thursday, Nov. 30.
A first of its kind in a Canadian hospital, the 4,500 square-foot Command Centre, to be situated on the third floor of the Keele Street and Wilson Avenue hospital, will be made up of 26 screens and staffed by a team of 15 from various hospital departments.
Designed and built with GE Healthcare Partners, the site will include a GE Wall of Analytics processing Real Time data from multiple source systems across hospital.
The system applies advanced and predictive analytics and provides a continuous “read out” alerting staff to everything from delayed patient care activity to unbalanced physician and staff workload.
This information provides Real Time decision support so staff can prioritize patient care activities and discharges, make short-term staffing decisions, and mitigate potential bottlenecks before they occur.
The Command Centre will be funded through ongoing business investments, private donations, and efficiency savings.
For Barb Collins, the Command Centre has been 12 years in the making.
That’s when Humber River Hospital’s president and CEO met Michael Dell, founder of Dell Technologies, who explained the capability of monitoring computers based around the world.
She likened the hospital’s Command Centre to airport command centres, where flights are monitored in detail.
“We’ll know what’s going on throughout the hospital,” she said. “We’ll be looking at patient flows, what beds are available. Is a patient waiting two hours (for test results)? Why? Right now, there’s no global view of what’s happening. (Staff) have to phone or email each other. With the Command Centre, all they have to do is look at the screens. We are trying to eliminate delays.”
Collins said the hospital had to become fully digital before embarking on the Command Centre because “there was no way we could collect data before electronic hospital records became real. This is a dream come true.”