Even in some of the most digitally advanced hospitals and clinics I visit, I frequently hear clinicians grousing about access to patient care data and systems. It’s not unusual for today’s healthcare settings to have multiple repositories of patient data in different departmental systems like admissions, lab, radiology, and pharmacy. Doctors and nurses complain about all the time they spend logging into and out of various applications over and over again as they go about their clinical day.
Even in some of the most digitally advanced hospitals and clinics I visit, I frequently hear clinicians grousing about access to patient care data and systems. It’s not unusual for today’s healthcare settings to have multiple repositories of patient data in different departmental systems like admissions, lab, radiology, and pharmacy. Doctors and nurses complain about all the time they spend logging into and out of various applications over and over again as they go about their clinical day. Sometimes this involves using different passwords for different applications. Things can get even more complicated as clinicians move from one area of the hospital to another, and especially from one device to another such as moving from a desktop, to a tablet or maybe a smartphone. All of this takes away precious time in caring for their patients.
But what if they could avoid all that by using a desktop solution that simplified access to multiple applications and patient records, and was even capable of following the clinician across multiple devices? Even better, what if that solution actually did save time, on average 30 to 45 minutes per day! That is just what has happened with a solution developed by Microsoft and OCSL, a long term supplier of IT solutions to the healthcare sector, for Luton and Dunstable NHS Foundation Trust Hospital in the UK.
Mark England, Director of Information Management and Technology, Luton and Dunstable NHS Hospital, said: “Speaking to staff we found that their biggest frustration was having to enter a password and select the patient for every system. acceSSOnce eliminates this time consuming process and makes it much simpler to securely access information when moving around the hospital. This improves the lives of our clinicians and increases the amount of time they can spend treating patients and providing care. On top of this we can take a stronger line with regard to information security and governance as we now have a much improved audit trail on access to our applications. acceSSOnce has revolutionized how we look at results. Instead of logging onto different systems, we log in once and look at all of the results in one go, saving us time and making us more efficient. Any additional time saved by being able to manage patients more efficiently means we’ll have more time to ensure we’re discharging our patients safely.”
When it comes to driving adoption of IT solutions that impact clinical workflow, nothing is more important than delighting end-users. Solutions that add work and take away time from patient care will always be unpopular with clinical staff. I’ve always found that giving back time is its own reward—a reward that is always welcomed by busy doctors, nurses and other clinicians.
Watch this video to learn more: