'Transparency' in Healthcare for the Best Patient Care Decisions

What does the word “transparency” mean to you?

If you’re a hospital CEO, your first thought likely is of policy changes that will require your institution to make treatment outcomes “transparent” to the public.

But to the average nurse, it conjures up the kind of vision previously available only to a super strong comic book hero who’s faster than a speeding locomotive and can leap tall buildings in a single bound: seeing all of the the right information to make the best patient care decisions!

As great as it might be to see through walls, that kind of vision isn’t necessary when you have TeleTracking.  After all, the transparency delivered by our Real-Time Capacity Management™ solutions gives you a lot more information than X-Ray vision can for taking care of patients.

Take, for example, our PatientTracking Portal™ view, which was designed specifically for unit level nurses to pick up where our PreAdmit Tracking® with the electronic bedboard® system for placement specialists leaves off.  

The latter gives placement specialists a bird’s eye view of bed status throughout the enterprise, allowing speedy and appropriate bed assignments. The former gives unit-level nurses the ability, on a single screen, to tap into nearly 100 streams of information to help them make the best possible care decisions for their patients.

PatientTracking Portal™ is basically a window into all of TeleTracking’s other applications, funneling instant updates to one screen – laptop, desktop or mobile device.  While the electronic bedboard is designed to get patients into the right beds, PatientTracking Portal™ is designed to better manage the care provided to the patients in those beds.

What the PatientTracking Portal™ view has done is make the nursing unit white board electronic and; turbocharged it with far more data than any grease pencil or marker ever could.

Here’s a short sampling of the sort of healthcare transparency that it provides:

• “Disguised patient name” to protect patient identity
• Names of nurses, doctors and other caregivers assigned to the patient
• Relevant patient attributes and isolation information
• Current patient location
• The name of the admitting/attending doctor
• The isolation type (airborne, contact)
• Time since patient was admitted (LOS)
• Patient characteristics (fall risk, etc.)
• Status (pending transfer, confirmed discharge)
• Status of lab, radiology and other diagnostic tests for the patient
• Calculated date and time of projected discharge

In many ways, the portal resembles a typical car dashboard, which provides a lot of relevant information about a car’s operation (speed, miles traveled, warning lights, etc.) packaged in a small space right in front of the driver. With TeleTracking’s PatientTracking Portal™, nurses get an interactive micro (unit) view that provides as much or as little information as needed.

Let’s say your patient needs to be downstairs for a diagnostic procedure at noon. The portal view can tell you the average transport time for transporters that morning.  If it’s taking 30 minutes on average, you know to place the transport request around 11:15 in order to ensure your patient won’t be late for a procedure.

Unit nurses love the portal view because it gives them more control of their patients. Charge nurses love it because it gives them more control of the unit.

PatientTracking Portal™ is a component of TeleTracking’s Capacity Management Suite™ system, and it is the only solution which lets you see information from all of the applications in a single glance.

Maybe we should call it “Windows.”  Wait, I think that’s already taken!