Within hospital facilities, in addition to human capital being fundamental, having the necessary equipment to treat patients adequately is vital. However, it is very difficult to predict the flow of patients that may enter the Emergency Department in a week or even a day; the variety of diagnoses that may be made and the treatment needs of these patients; … An unpredictable nature typical of healthcare facilities that must be counteracted with good organisation.
An organization that, today, with the current COVID-19 pandemic, becomes even more necessary. Indeed, one of the main consequences of the virus is certainly the saturation of hospital centres and, above all, the lack of beds in units that are as important in the fight against the disease as the ICUs.
According to pre-pandemic studies, “in developed countries the percentage of ICU beds in total hospitals is around 5% (in Spain, 2.5%)4,5 with an increasingly broad portfolio of services, including the acceptance of patients in earlier and less severe phases, where the demonstrated benefit is greater. This has meant that ICUs are often at full capacity and even overloaded”.
This situation highlights two aspects:
– The need to increase the ratio of ICU beds or areas rapidly convertible to ICUs in order to cope with unexpected events such as the current ones.
– The importance of bed control and maintaining updated and real time information on occupied beds, available beds and the status of patients in them.
In this sense, MYSPHERA, has always taken into account how vital it is to have updated and real information about everything that happens inside a hospital. That is why MYSPHERA’s RTLS solutions allow to optimise and improve a large number of processes within the hospital environment, one of them being the ability to know the location of the patients at all times, as well as making it possible to control the inventory by knowing where all the assets are in real time.
Applying this technology to ICU bed management allows us to have
– A list of total ICU beds
– List of available beds
– List of ICU patients
– List of the location of the different patients in each ICU bed
– List of patients needing ICU bed allocation
– Patient and bed conditions
Without doubt, one of the most important keys to optimal patient care is information, since information is always power. Power to be able to execute plans better, to seek the best alternatives in the face of possible inconvenience and, above all, power to be able to make decisions that affect something as important as public health.
