Nursing Research Today is a free monthly online journal that collates and summarizes the latest research about Nursing, including details on health care, hospital staff, professional care.

INCOMING!--A web tracking application for PACU and post-surgical patients.

Meyer MA, Sokal SM, Sandberg W, Chang Y, Daily B, Berger DL

Laboratory of Computer Science, Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, Massachusetts 02114, USA. mameyer@partners.org

BACKGROUND: Capacity constraints necessitate improving hospital efficiency. An integrated real time system facilitating patient flow between the post-anesthesia care unit (PACU) and surgical ward would ease PACU workload by reducing the effort of discharging patients. METHODS: We developed INCOMING!, a web-based platform that monitors patient progress from the operating room to the PACU. INCOMING! integrates available data, automatically determining when a patient enters the PACU. An automated paging system alerts clinical unit managers to 'pull' their patients from the PACU after a set recovery period. General surgery patients were included in the INCOMING! system in late 2004 with paging added in mid-March 2005. Mean PACU length of stay was calculated for the intervention group (general surgery patients with INCOMING!) and compared to a control group (general surgery patients without INCOMING!) and an orthopedic surgery group before and after paging. RESULTS: The system successfully gathers data and generates automated pages when events occur. After paging, there was a significant difference between the orthopedic surgery control group and the general surgery intervention group (235 min versus 185 min, P = 0.001). The mean PACU LOS decreased in the INCOMING! intervention group by 26 min while the mean LOS increased by 28 min in the general surgery control group (P = 0.27). CONCLUSION: Pilot implementation demonstrates that INCOMING! performs the desired integration and automatic notification. Given the minimal cost and potential large gains from a wider deployment, we plan to implement the system for all PACU patients and all post-PACU care units.

Published 1 May 2006 in J Surg Res, 132(2): 153-8.
Full-text of this article is available online (may require subscription).

© 2005-2008 Nursing Research Today. All Rights Reserved.