Chatham-Kent Health Alliance, a 200+ bed community hospital located in Ontario Canada has found a new key in their Patient Flow Planning – updating their interaction with the Housekeeping and Portering teams.Sarah Padfield, Chief Operating Officer during CKHA’s organization wide push to better their overall performance said that they “took a big picture approach, centered on a strong belief in our people, and the tools needed to achieve our performance goals”.
One area that CKHA looked at, which many hospitals have not yet, was the interaction between the Housekeeping and Portering teams and the rest of the hospital.
“It became very apparent that there was a need to get the housekeeping teams real-time information on the status of various locations throughout the hospital” stated Franck Hivert, CEO of Oculys Health Informatics. “These teams are rarely at a desk yet communication with them is vital when trying to address overall patient flow within a Hospital”.
The result was the collaboration between CKHA and Oculys to develop “KeepNTouch”, a real-time mobile workflow companion that allows users to manage tasks and collaborate with teams in real time. “Now, from their mobile device, housekeeping teams can see rooms to be cleaned and discharge cleaning requirements while also receiving updates of cleaning status and jobs in the cue,” said Hivert. “Because CKHA is already using our Performance tool for overall hospital efficiency, we also ensured KeepNTouch would send push notifications of room readiness to Performance which is helping us to remove another barrier in overall patient flow”.
The results to date have been outstanding. The Housekeeping team who were not previously using a great deal of technology in their day-to-day workflow gravitated to the new solution and realized its benefit immediately.
“Oculys has changed how we work and made things much more streamlined states Amy Zoumboulis, Supervisor, Housekeeping CKHA; it is the last thing I check at night, and the first thing I look at in the morning”
Oculys has since launched the same solution at Markham Stouffville, a two-site community hospital serving almost 400,000 residents, and seen the same take-up rate and results.