The VBHC awards magazine published in its latest issue the article written by our UK Country Manager and colleague, Jordi Rovira, about the ORvital solution.
Digital transformation has become a reality in 90% of the ecosystems that move society. However, not all have embraced this transition with the same speed and adaptability and, healthcare was precisely one of those sectors lagging behind. Notwithstanding the above, COVID-19 has given a boost to the digital transformation, a fundamental tool for guaranteeing continuity of care during the worst moments of the pandemic.
There are numerous initiatives and organizations that defend the digitalization of healthcare, not only as a technological disruption but also as a philosophical framework in which the fundamental objective is: The Satisfaction of both, professionals and patients.
One of the most outstanding initiatives is the ‘Value-Based HealthCare’ awards, which reward and recognize inspiring initiatives that have adopted a fundamentally new line of thinking to create excellent value for the patient in terms of real results, real connections, and a common language.
This year, the awards have highlighted MYSPHERA and its important role in the digital transformation of healthcare through the publication of an article in its ‘VBHC Thinkers Digital Magazine’.
Read the full article below:
ORVital: Digital Intervention Based on a Patient-Flow RTLS Solution to Support the Automation of Standardized Surgical Pathways
Author: Jordi Rovira Simón, Country Manager at MYSPHERA
Operating Room 4.0 (OR4.0) was an innovation initiative, funded by the European Commission’s H2020 Research & Innovation programme, under grant agreement ID: 812386.
The surgical block is a hospital area that comes under extreme pressure and represents a significant part of a hospital’s overall costs. The complexity of these areas, involving a large number of professionals and teams working in time-demanding constraints, entails an important management challenge. At present, surgical blocks are unable to operate optimally for the afore-mentioned reasons. Often, they present poor performance. In turn, this has a negative impact on the quality of care for patients and it results in the squandering of a hospital’s budget.
The project consisted of Vall d’Hebron University Hospital, in Barcelona, together with MYSPHERA, co-designing a pioneering solution. The main goal was to develop a digital intervention that would support improved collaboration among the varying staff teams and hospital areas throughout the surgical process. It involved admissions, preparation, anaesthetics, theatres, recovery, discharge areas and teams, as well as porters and cleaners, all of which are key to ensure a smooth patient flow.
The hospital aimed to leverage real-time location technologies (RTLS) to record concurrent patient journeys in real time and support standardisation of clinical pathways and their associated process times. By using the generated live data and events, a set of tailored applications based on Bluetooth RTLS were designed for each area team, allowing them to seamlessly follow patient flows, receive notifications and assign tasks among teams, as patients moved along the process (e.g., patient is gowned and ready to be transferred to the preparation room; patient is ready to be transferred to theatre 3,etc.).
As a result of the new digital intervention, communication was improved dramatically, reducing much of the staff’s chronic frustration. Subsequently, patients were provided with a better service delivery, and an improved and seamless experience. The staff were also relieved of manually entering timestamps into the information system, freeing up more time for patient care. After validating the solution for two years in the General Surgery unit with nineteen theatres, the surgical block performance rose by 12.5% to reach 82.5%, close to the optimal 85%.
This allowed the hospital to increase surgical activity by more than 1000 new procedures in the same wing. Most importantly, the patient/family experience was improved as the number of cancellations per day was reduced because of better scheduling due to having accurate times.
Furthermore, families were kept informed of the patient’s current status throughout the whole process by means of a real-time handheld application (e.g., there has been a delay; the patient has left the operating theatre, etc). Interestingly, patient safety was reinforced as the electronic system used during the whole process — part of the real-time location system — ensured the right patient was in the right theatre, helping to prevent “NEVER EVENTS”. Finally, the real-time patient flow solution was connected to the climate control system of the surgical site to dynamically adjust the climate conditions for each respective theatre by putting them on standby as patients went in and out of theatres and turning them off after the surgical session had finalised and at weekends. This led to a significant energy saving of around 30% of the surgical block’s total energy consumption.
The success of the novel intervention spurred the hospital to roll out the system to the other three surgical sites, covering a total of 51 theatres. The novel digital solution has been branded as ORVital, and MYSPHERA is boosting the scale-up across Europe, with adoption in Spain and reference sites in France, Belgium and the UK.
“To finely monitor complex areas like the surgical block, it is essential to have high-quality process data to be able to take accurate measures and implement improvements. Without it, health professionals find themselves increasingly at the mercy of a chaotic and fragmented system.”
