Staff at St Michael’s Hospital in Dun Laoghaire, Ireland, now have real-time oversight of a patient’s journey through its emergency department, thanks to an IMS MAXIMS electronic patient management system.
St Michael’s is located in South Dublin, and is part of the St Vincent’s Healthcare Group.
IMS MAXIMS said key highlights included:
- Patient safety would be greatly improved, as electronic medical records avoided the clinical risks associated with paper, such as mislaid medical notes and illegible handwriting.
- Live tracking of a patient’s condition meant patients could be prioritised according to their level of urgency, triage priority, and length of stay.
- Because St Michael’s and St Vincent’s were now using the same system, on-call consultants would be able to access electronic records in both EDs and manage demand remotely.
- Dashboard screens reporting on ED performance had been created and could be monitored at a local, regional and national level.
- The implementation was supporting paper-lite working, and the next step would be to make the department completely paperless by introducing other clinical systems.
Olive Vines, Emergency Department Nurse Manager, St. Michael’s Hospital said: “Since the successful go-live, nursing and medical documentation have improved significantly, becoming clearer and more concise. Our workflow processes have become more efficient with the reduction of transcribing patient details into hand written referral and GP letters. Our need for storage of paper notes has also reduced and the introduction of an electronic version of the Manchester Triage system allows the ED to provide standardised patient priority allocation.
“Switching from a completely outdated, inadequate ED patient assessment and care documentation paper system to MAXIMS has been a dramatic change management project for the staff of St Michael’s ED. The transformation however, has been a success because of the true partnership approach between us and IMS MAXIMS – from the outset and throughout we worked as one team.”
