Bonn Community Hospital

THE CUSTOMER

The St. Elisabeth/St. Peter/St. John Community Hospital in Bonn was created in 1996 from the merger of the St. Elisabeth and St. Peter's Brüderkrankenhaus hospitals. The St. Johannes Hospital joined the consortium in 2002. The hospital is equipped with all the necessary specialist departments for regular medical care and has just under 500 beds. Every year, around 18,000 inpatient and over 40,000 outpatient treatments are performed. The hospital is the only inner city hospital in Bonn. It employs almost 1,000 people, around 150 of whom are full-time doctors and about 450 work in nursing or therapeutic areas.

What was needed was a device that doctors and nurses could carry with them all the time that they could use to access clinically relevant data from anywhere in the hospital and also produce documentation directly. The focus was on modernizing the hospital and its processes. Other important requirements for the Community Hospital were more efficient working and improvement of the quality of care provided. Most of all, great importance was attached to accurate documentation both as a duty and a prerequisite for proper care. All information had to be structured and available in a comprehensible form, and be immediately accessible to allow rapid intervention in an emergency. Another criterion was a clear separation of the different duties carried out by doctors and nursing staff. In future, these should be separated and documented according to responsibilities. In addition, higher safety standards in drug therapy were to be introduced to provide more guidance to doctors in this area. The ultimate goal was to completely dispense with paper documentation in the future.

Vascular surgery was one of the first wards in the community hospital to introduce mobile working with iMedOne^® Mobile. The bulky paper files are now a thing of the past. Instead, nursing staff can access the iMedOne^® hospital information system (HIS) from anywhere, which thanks to the handy size of the iPad Mini, they can now carry with them in their apron pocket at all times and retrieve the necessary information right away. The ward has six iPad Minis, three each for the doctors and nursing staff. When one of the nurses finishes their shift, they pass on their iPad Mini to a colleague. The doctors' devices are personalized. Doctors and nursing staff collect a great deal of medical information directly at the patient's bedside. This is very practical, especially for vascular surgery, because the iPad Minis have a camera that can be accessed by the iMedOne Mobile^® app. The nurses use the device to photograph wounds and import the images directly into the digital file. So no time is wasted with tedious reformatting operations and data transfers. Incorrect assignments of wound photos are prevented, as the patient data is always automatically inserted into each image. To avoid confusion, new patients are also photographed and their picture is attached to the file. The software covers the entire maintenance process. All the necessary work steps are given here: tapping on the relevant category selects it with a green check mark. Double tapping results in a red check mark and indicates that the procedure was not necessary or not feasible, and was therefore not performed. In addition to the vital signs, the digital file contains all available information such as laboratory data, or can be linked to the PACS to display X-Ray images on the iPad Mini. Everything available in the HIS is also accessible from the mobile app.

Digital working has increased efficiency and improved care. The digital data only needs to be collected once. This reduces costs and avoids additional stress for the patient – for example, due to X-rays. The digital documentation is also more accurate. Mistakes caused by difficulty in reading a doctor's handwriting no longer occur. Due to the increasingly complex processes in medicine, even doctors need guidance in their everyday work, which involves vitally important decisions. With the help of iMedOne^® and iMedOne^® Mobile, doctors at the Bonn hospital can call upon electronic decision-making tools, such as a safety check for a drug therapy, or medications suggested by the system. Digital data management is particularly advantageous for a facility such as Bonn which is based at several locations, as the data can be accessed from all sites. But there are other reasons that favor the introduction of digital processes, such as billing or documentation.