Mobile bedside technology improves clinician and patient experience

November 15, 2023
South Okanagan General Hospital

When a health-care professional sees a patient at an Interior Health hospital, it’s important both for the health-care professional to have access to key patient information and for the patient to feel heard and seen. Interior Health has piloted mobile, modern technology at the South Okanagan General Hospital (SOGH) to achieve just that.

Interior Health currently accesses shared information about patients through a health information system called MEDITECH. In a hospital setting, workstations on wheels (WOWs) are brought into patients’ rooms so health-care professionals can connect to MEDITECH. The issue is that WOWs are often bulky, hard to maneuver and can be disruptive to sleeping patients.

By using MEDITECH’s Expanse Point of Care (POC) technology, health-care professionals can trade their WOWs for mobile devices that can connect to MEDITECH and key patient information.

“We could see POC’s potential and the benefits of having a pocket-sized device staff can easily take into a patient's room without disruption,” said Teresa Fortune, the clinical operations manager at SOGH. “It would also untether our clinicians from their WOWs and enable them to spend more time engaging with patients at the bedside.” 

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