Innovations in eHealth can improve medical care & increase efficiency: Foundation Trust set to boost patient care with content management system.
01 September 2009
Healthcare is one of the biggest challenges facing our societies, economies and governments over the coming decades. At a personal level almost everyone has an experience, not only about healthcare, about healthcare innovation. At the organizational level, the private sector has a key opportunity to contribute to transform and innovate in the healthcare field.
Program Fast Facts
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Situation
We are at a turning point in healthcare, if we are to make the substantial improvements necessary to our healthcare systems over the coming decades, we will need to embrace healthcare innovations.
Solution
Developments such as Common user interface, designed in collaboration between Microsoft and the UK’s National Health Service show the benefit that technological innovations can bring to healthcare.
- 8 hospital sites are being inter-connected via intranet
- 7 000 employees use technology to communicate across these sites
- 400 000 patients benefit from the health services of University Hospitals Bristol (www.uhbristol.nhs.uk )
Benefits
- Reduced costs
- Improved efficiency and patient care
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One impediment to innovation is the traditional structure of many healthcare systems. Most care is delivered in the same context – of general practitioners’ surgeries, accident and emergency, outpatients and hospital wards – as in the 19th century. New technologies that empower patients would force change. Developments such as a Common User Interface, designed in collaboration between Microsoft and the UK’s National Health Service, and innovative products such as Microsoft’s Personal Health Record (Health Vault), show the potential.
One example to showcase the improvements that innovative ICT can bring to the system is illustrated in the following example from the University Hospitals Bristol, where productive communication was supported with the help of an intranet between several locations. Its existing intranet was underused, proving a barrier to effective collaboration and knowledge transfer. Users required intensive training and demanded dedicated support from the IT team. With a solution based on Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, the trust is rolling out a new intranet where users can create sites and workgroups and edit content independently.Staff have now faster access to up-to-date information, while the IT team saves eight hours a week, and has time for value-added tasks elsewhere.
Improved collaboration and new tools, such as a Web part that integrates a real-time view of bed availability, means the medical staff can make better-informed decisions that directly improve the quality of health services for the community it serves.
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