Since its implementation last year, the bed board at CoxHealth has helped improve service for patients by tracking bed occupancy throughout the hospital. Now the technology has earned Cox recognition with an Innovator Award from Hospitals & Health Networks magazine.
The bed board was recognized in the magazine’s July issue, which featured its 10th annual listing of the 100 Most Wired Hospitals and Health Systems. The Innovator Award specifically recognizes hospitals that have pursued technical advances related to their missions.
The bed board was developed in house by Information Technology’s eHealth team in 2007.
Chief information officer Bruce Robison says the team looked at applications from vendors, but nothing suited Cox’s specific needs. To be efficient, the system would need to be able to interface with other software applications and current systems used by departments ranging from Admissions to Environmental Services.
“The purchased product wouldn’t do that out of the box, so we had to develop something more specialized,” Robison says. “We were able to do it at a far lower cost, too. We would have paid four or five times more than the cost of development to purchase a product.”
The bed board system is monitored from an office in the tunnel at Cox South, where registration specialists monitor the status of more than 500 patient beds on two 55-inch flat-screen monitors. Like air-traffic controllers for the hospital, the registration team coordinates the flow of patients by tracking which beds are full and which are open.
Elise Jones, a registration specialist in Admissions, says the board also allows “bed ahead” planning, in which beds can be requested based on anticipated need.
“If a patient is having surgery and we know they’ll need to stay, this lets the floor pull up a report that shows how many patients we’re expecting,” Jones says.
The board also shows the registration team a large amount of at-a-glance information about the beds. Beds coded green are open; pink indicates a bed occupied by a female, blue by a male. Brown-coded beds are dirty; orange ones are blocked by a doctor’s order.
“The nice thing about this is there’s a lot of information, but there’s no personal information,” Jones says. “It works like a charm.”
On patient floors, information is featured on screens mounted at each nurses’ station. Graphics show the status of each bed and in the center, a traffic-signal graphic shows the overall status of beds throughout the system. Robison says it’s an improvement over the previous system, under which it was more difficult for staff to see the complete picture at a glance.
“This shows the layout of the floor, so we all know exactly where we stand here,” he says. “The system really benefits the patients because we can move patients in and out more quickly and accommodate their needs more effectively.
“It’s a win-win – we know more about what we’re doing and it’s better for our patients.”
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