“Handwritten medical observation charts could become a thing of the past in UK hospitals with the development of an iPad-based patient monitoring system,” Antony Savvas reports for Computerworld UK.
“Developed in Oxford hospitals, the iPad-based early-warning system, developed with EPSRC (Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council) funding, is one of the projects funded by the £260 million ‘Safer Hospitals, Safer Wards’ NHS Technology Fund to improve patient safety,” Savvas reports. “The £1.1 million Oxford funding will allow the team of biomedical engineers and clinicians from the University of Oxford and the Oxford University Hospitals (OUH) NHS Trust to roll out the system across all adult wards in the trust’s acute hospitals.”
Savvas reports, “The new approach uses the tablet technology both to record and to evaluate patients’ vital signs. It will help alert medical staff to patient deterioration on the wards more reliably. Just as now, nurses will regularly take readings of a patient’s vital signs such as heart rate and blood pressure. But instead of writing the information on an observation chart, they will input it into an iPad…”
Read more in the full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “James W.” for the heads up.]