Cisco Integrated EHR Solutions Case Study

1 © 2012 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved.

Nottingham University Hospitals Deploys State-of-the-Art Cisco Cius Mobile Workforce Solution with Nervecentre Software to Increase Operational Efficiency and Improve Patient CareCius replaces outdated communications system to streamline collaboration and help caregivers spend more time with patients

HIGHLIGHTS

CUSTOMER PROFILE

•Client Name: Nottingham University Hospitals

•Headquarters: Nottingham, England

•Revenue/Assets: £722.5 million

•Employees: 13,000

•Wards: 87

•Beds: Approx. 1,700

CISCO SOLUTION

•Cisco Cius

BENEFIT HIGHLIGHTS OF CISCO CIUS WITH NERVECENTRE

•Combination of mobile computing and collaboration capabilities empowers a virtualized desktop environment

•Color coded alerts help staff prioritize patient calls

• Improved operational efficiency has eliminated confusing repeat calls, increased complete jobs per hour

•20x improvement in senior nurse direct clinical care

•Secure environment keeps patient data safe

•8,000 hours of additional clinical support capacity directed into patient care

•ROI in 4 years with annual savings of $161,750

Hospital at the Forefront of CareFormed in 2006 and comprised of Queen’s Medical Centre, Nottingham City Hospital, and Ropewalk House, Nottingham University Hospitals (NUH) has become one of the busiest acute care medical centers in England. Each year, it serves more than 2.5 million residents in the local area and provides specialist services to an additional 3-4 million people in neighboring counties. The hospital has earned a reputation of international prominence for outstanding stroke, renal, neurosciences, cancer, and trauma specialty care. As a teaching institution, NUH is at the forefront of many research programs and new surgical procedures in partnership with the University of Nottingham.

2 © 2012 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved.

The hospital employs 13,000 staff, of which a there is a mix of highly skilled doctors, nurses, and resident student physicians. With round-the-clock care, “hospital at night” (H@N) — the 16 hours outside the typical 9-5 workday — had become a challenge to manage and provide optimum care. At issue was communication among the small staff teams, prioritizing patient cases, and maintaining the highest level of care possible. Since H@N represents 75% of the working year, it was crucial that NUH implement a solution that would increase operational efficiency and enable senior staff to provide direct clinical care.

To overcome these challenges, the hospital deployed Cisco Cius, a mobile collaboration and computing device along with Nervecentre Software that NUH uses to keep hospital staff in constant communication and enable real-time workflow optimization.

Communication ChallengesAccording to Dr. Dominick Shaw, a lead consultant of H@N, the hospital’s pager system hadn’t been upgraded since the 1960s. This antiquated technology was unreliable and clumsy, requiring doctors to find a phone to respond to pages. Fraught with delays, the process meant that response times weren’t timely, multiple requests created challenges for the staff, patient data was not handled in a consolidated manner, jobs weren’t being completed and logged effectively, and most importantly, patient care was sub-optimal.

Vicky Kaluza, a H@N coordinator and senior staff nurse says, “The volume of calls was immense. There were up to 150 calls in a shift. We couldn’t prioritize calls. We were always chained to our desks because the bleep would continually go off.” This flawed communication system meant that highly skilled H@N coordinators were spending 97% of their time at their desks, leaving only a very small window of time to care for patients.

While it would have been easy to give everyone a mobile phone, NUH needed a solution that was more robust. The Cisco Cius provided unparalleled mobility and an ecosystem to enable mobile application delivery in conjunction with the Nervecentre workflow application. Together they improved efficiency with embedded tracking capabilities to log and tag patient jobs, utilize innovative mobile and paperless technologies, and also help hospital staff prioritize and manage their workload — to provide the quickest response times and the best patient care possible.

Cisco Cius “Perfect” for the HospitalPaul Cook, an account manager with Cisco’s UK Healthcare division, says Cius was perfect for NUH because of its combination of mobile computing capabilities and mobile communication features that best supports the virtual desktop environment. The Cius solution enables staff to be out in wards caring for patients and yet always connected to the latest patient status and requests. Moreover, the video communications devices were ideal to improve staff communications. He says most importantly, Cius is very secure, so critical patient data will always be safe.

Implementation teams found Cius to be an optimum platform because it provides the simplicity of an Android development environment while providing access to the entire end-to-end suite of Cisco collaboration technologies.

“It has cut down on repeated calls. It means we can manage our team much more efficiently, and the number of jobs processed per hour has really increased.”— Dr. Dominick Shaw, lead consultant H@N, Nottingham University Hospitals

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Unified Communications Redefines Patient Care, Improves Bottom LineDr. Shaw says that since NUH staff members have begun using Cius, “There has been a step change in practice at our hospital.” With the new system, patient jobs are coded with red, green, and amber alerts to quickly signal the status. This allows doctors and nurses to prioritize response times and address urgent patient needs over routine requests. Vicky Kaluza echoes Dr. Shaw’s sentiment by saying that, “Hand-over meetings are a lot quicker and simpler because everything is computerized.” Furthermore, Cius has reduced repeat calls and staff confusion, so more jobs are completed per hour. Staff satisfaction has been rated at a whopping 90%.

Indeed, statistics prove that Cius has had a dramatic impact on the hospital. H@N coordinators now spend 60% of their time providing direct clinical care — a vast improvement over the previous 3% patient care with old processes — adding approximately 8,000 senior nursing clinical hours back into the organization each year. Equally as impressive, NUH has realized a return on its investment in four years, with an annual savings of $161,750.

“One of the benefits of the application of Cius was that it allowed the senior nurses to be out, mobile in the ward environment, and in total it added approximately 8,000 senior clinical hours back into our organization in a year.”— Andrew Fern, Director ICT Services, Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust