Article published by Redacción Médica – View original
MYSPHERA’s ORvital system improves patient flow management and coordination between healthcare professionals.
Two years into the pandemic and with most of the consequences of the virus behind us, it seems that hospitals are returning to some degree of normality. Most Spanish regions have managed to reduce the average waiting times for surgery and different specialties, which increased due to Covid-19, according to data from the Spanish Ministry of Health. Therefore, digitalization and systems such as ORvital from MYSPHERA manage to reduce this waiting time and improve patient care.
According to the company, the reduction of waiting times “is good news but still not the best scenario”. “As the latest data from the Spanish Ministry of Health show, although waiting times have been reduced, the total number of people on the waiting list continues to increase. All this despite the extra effort of the staff, who continue to extend operating hours and even divert patients to private hospitals,” they say.
For this reason, they consider that “the figures continue to affect the health situation”. “This problem has already reached private hospitals, where one of their main attractions was the non-existence of waiting lists,” they add.
MYSPHERA, a company with more than 10 years of experience in the sector, explains that “to combat this situation, which is so deeply rooted in our healthcare system, we need to look to the future; temporary plans for specific moments are no longer useful”. “Patients should not have to wait so long, especially when there are already technological solutions capable of addressing these problems and being a standard-bearer for the digital transformation that is so necessary for hospitals,” they say.
In fact, this extensive experience and knowledge of the specific processes and problems faced by hospitals have allowed them to develop complete solutions that, beyond the usual localization, have a workflow management engine that allows them to automate processes.
Reducing operating theatre times
MYSPHERA recently presented the results of its ORvital surgical block solution. In all its deployments, it has managed to increase surgical throughput by more than 12 percent, which means that ORs using ORvital have had a throughput equivalent to a year of thirteen months compared to previous periods.
Particularly remarkable are the figures obtained at the Vall d’Hebron hospital in Barcelona and the Saint Joseph hospital in Paris. In the former, the hospital itself has calculated that, for a block of 19 operating theatres, the operating theatre start time ratio has been reduced by 35 minutes, unplanned extensions were reduced by 50 percent and the occupancy rate of PACU beds rose from 65 percent to 81 percent. In the second, where the solution was implemented for the Outpatient Surgery Unit, the hospital estimates that the solution has enabled them to increase the unit’s capacity by more than 70 percent.
How does ORvital work?
ORvital is based on a technological tool, a real-time location system (RTLS), and builds digital applications around it to address specific problems in the management of patient flow and coordination between healthcare staff.
Salvador Vera, CEO and founder of MYSPHERA, explains how it works: “We use our wristbands to locate each patient during their stay at the centre. This alone is already a great asset to measure and improve patient flow, but we have gone a step further by using this data to automate and orchestrate processes in hospitals”.
“For example, if a patient leaves the operating theatre, we send an automatic task to those responsible for preparing the ward for the next procedure. Or if both patient and OR are notified that they are ready for surgery, we send a task to the orderlies to proceed with the transfer. Our ultimate goal is to free healthcare professionals from spending their time on anything other than patient care, be it administrative tasks, coordination actions or unnecessary waiting,” Vera adds.
The company stresses that the key to reducing waiting lists lies right there, in time management. “Not just the time it takes for a patient to be seen, but the time that technology is able to give medical professionals to devote entirely to the care of these patients,” they conclude.
