Bringing data together in accessible form

Today’s nurse call and patient communication systems can generate a multitude of useful data – on everything from response times to the most frequent call types at a particular time of day, as well as identifying which patient beds have seen the most calls logged, and alerting estates and facilities teams to common or repeated equipment faults. To date, however, leading nurse call system manufacturer, Wandsworth Healthcare, says, the ability to view such key data in a ‘clean and accessible’ form, and to present it graphically to whoever needs to see it, has been largely lacking. This month – at Healthcare Estates 2017 – the company will unveil an extension to its established IPiN system, IPiN INSiTE – designed to effectively address these issues. HEJ editor, Jonathan Baillie, reports.

Wandsworth Healthcare’s new ‘extension’ to its now well-established ‘full IP’ IPiN Evolution nurse call system – which its own software specialists have spent the past nine months developing – is designed to make it easy for anybody from senior nursing personnel and ward managers to a Trust’s senior management team to view at-a-glance data that can provide both timed ‘snapshots’ of nurse call system activity over, say, a particular day or week, and wider trends such as response times over a week or month, or fault codes on particular equipment. The data is presented in a clear, accessible manner via a series of ‘dashboards’ which, by harnessing coloured graphics such as charts and graphs, make gaining a clear impression of, say, staff performance and response times, significantly easier for a ward manager than poring over a pile of printed Excel spreadsheets. 

Addressing an anomaly