Knappschaft Hospital Bottrop

THE CUSTOMER

The Knappschaft Hospital Bottrop combines tradition and modernity: founded in 1931 originally to provide healthcare for miners, the hospital for basic and regular care has since developed into a modern and forward-looking service company in the healthcare sector. The approximately 900 staff members look after 13,500 people each year as inpatients and provide outpatient care for more than 44,000 cases. Just under 350 beds are available in the nine specialist clinics. As an academic teaching hospital within the University of Duisburg-Essen, the institution places a special emphasis on continuously improving its services. Quality management regularly undergoes the certification procedure known as "Cooperation for Transparency and Quality in Healthcare" [Kooperation für Transparenz und Qualität im Gesundheitswesen, KTQ]. With annual revenues of 56 million euros, the Knappschaft Hospital Bottrop matches the turnover of a major company.

In order to support clinical workflows and speed up data processing, the Knappschaft Hospital Bottrop has now been using iMedOne^®since 2005, among other systems. Initially, the hospital staff could only access the system from fixed desktop computers. At the patient's bedside, doctors and nursing staff had to use bulky trolleys as a means of transporting the computer during ward rounds. On top of that, there were never enough trolleys to meet demand. What was needed was a device that doctors and nurses could carry with them all the time and which they could use to access clinically relevant data from anywhere in the hospital. It had to allow staff not only to retrieve data, but also to enter and edit it. Until now, the nursing staff entered vital signs such as blood pressure and pulse rate on paper forms. This process also had to be possible to do digitally at the point of care, so that the data would be stored directly in the HIS. Other requirements were user-friendly operation of the solution and a reasonable price.

Together with the Knappschaft Hospital Bottrop, the iMedOne Mobile team, which was then still part of the Finnish IT company Tieto, developed the iMedOne^® Mobile app, which is now being further developed and distributed by Deutsche Telekom Clinical Solutions. The app allows mobile access to the HIS via WiFi, which is available throughout the hospital. Doctors and caregivers enter vital signs, appointments and orders into the HIS directly at the bedside via an iPad mini. They can also retrieve clinically important data, such as X-rays and laboratory results, on the spot. The devices are pure input and output media, the data always remains in the in-house data center. With the mobile devices, the staff can also photograph wounds, record the progress of the wound and store all the data in the digital file. A dictation function allows users to generate dictations and send them directly to a printing service. If a staff member needs a doctor's approval, this can also be quickly obtained via the mobile devices. To protect access to iMedOne^®, WiFi is encrypted using the WPA2 standard. In addition, users must log into the HIS. Some senior staff can also connect to the HIS from home via a secure VPN tunnel. All devices are centrally managed, so that access rights can be blocked at any time or the app can be deleted on individual devices externally.

With iMedOne^® Mobile, the Knappschaft Hospital Bottrop saves time spent on documentation and improves its quality. This gives doctors and nurses more time for the patients. The hospital saves money while enhancing its reputation as a modern, patient-friendly clinic. The mobile interface to the HIS enables virtually paperless documentation and direct storage without error-prone intermediate steps. Because data is fed into the HIS directly at the patient's bedside, it is available to all interested parties without a time delay. And communication is faster too: nurses can get approvals promptly via the app. Doctors issue treatment orders electronically, or respond quickly to inquiries. In addition, every access is logged accurately, who changed, added or deleted which data in the HIS and when. The intuitive usability of the app reduces the training required for the hospital to an average of just twenty minutes per employee. "Because the app is so easy to use, our employees quickly accepted iMedOne^®Mobile," says Sabine Cittrich, project manager at the Knappschaft Hospital Bottrop. “Doctors and caregivers now even enjoy performing their documentation tasks digitally on their mobile devices.” In addition, instead of carrying several devices with them, such as a digital camera and dictation device, doctors and nurses now carry only one device that combines all functions. The app also makes work planning easier: for example, using the filter settings, doctors can call up only the operations for which they still have to write a report, or they can define various useful work lists.