TAGNOS - Hospital Efficiency Innovation

The Patient Flow module (PFM) is a departmental application, currently only for Radiology and Surgery, that is designed to follow patients through a flexible set of treatment stages and diagnostic procedures. Although this application is also tracking the patients through rooms and corridors of the hospital, the movement of the patient is evaluated by the analytics engine and then assigned to specific treatment or diagnostic actions. This allows the system to provide visibility to gaps in the predicted schedule and potential service level conflicts to the staff. The dashboard is designed to meet the specific requirements of the hospital and includes a feature that allows family members and friends to track the progress of their patient through the care giving process.

The ED module (EDM) is an application specifically designed for emergency department use. The module has some similarities to the Patient Flow module except that it will be designed to accommodate the high-volume, unscheduled arrival nature of the ED, as well as patient movement (hand-offs) to other departments such as Radiology. Expected features include: patient elopement management, automated hand-off to the In-patient module, bed availability (integrated with In-patient module), and reporting of service levels & times. Automated documentation of patient-caregiver contact can also be provided.

The OR Module (ORM) is designed to help improve the utilization, turnaround time, and throughput of operating rooms in a hospital, resulting in significant gains in productivity and patient satisfaction. The ORM understands and orchestrates the OR process flow, so that procedures can start in a timely manner, while also ensuring reduced turnaround times, allowing more procedures to be performed every day. As a result, utilization of equipment and staff is also optimized. Timely start and finish of procedures also means greater patient satisfaction. The OR dashboard provides the overall as well as detailed status of each operating room, as well as other useful statistics such as utilization and last turnaround time. It also tells surgeons and other staff when their next procedure is, without them having to make phone calls or be paged. Detailed reports on daily OR activity allow administrators to understand and analyze bottlenecks.

The In-patient module (IPM) is designed to provide patient tracking in the designated areas of the institution where patients are likely to be moved or allowed to self-ambulate. IPM provides room-level location in all areas that the hospital wishes to monitor. A hospital may choose to include outpatient areas as well as all diagnostic and treatment areas where both in-patients and out-patients are seen. In this case IPM could serve as a macro-level patient flow application, but would not include the specific dashboards and treatment flow views that are included in the Patient Flow Module. Features for the IPM include monitoring and documentation of patient ambulation, Proactive and Reactive detection of patient falls, patient wandering, documentation of caregiver-patient contacts, bed management, real-time patient census, and integration with the Asset Tracking dashboard.

The Asset Tracking module (ATM) is a whole-hospital tracking system for assets of all types and sizes, except for very small items where the tracking tag would not fit well. This module may use the same sensor-reader network as IPM or any other application, but a well-designed system would include additional areas of the hospital where patient tracking is generally not needed. Since the asset tags generally “sleep” until moved, this module also provides the ability to record when items are put into service, and with staff tracking, who has put an item into service. The ATM includes a dashboard similar to the IPM dashboard with respect to location on a floor plan and the two dashboards may be combined for more efficient use in the patient care areas. Features for the ATM include reporting of assets in use by room, alerts to caregivers and other staff of equipment recalls or required maintenance, and real-time asset inventories.