Smart state makes smart technology out of waiting room hazards
Smart state makes smart technology out of waiting room hazards
November/December Edition, 2007: While politicians debate the state of public hospital emergency rooms across the country, the CSIRO is putting ideas in action and searching for solutions to reduce delays and bottlenecks occurring in hospitals.
A joint division of the CSIRO and Queensland Government, the e-Health Research Centre (EHRC) will receive a $300,000 grant to undertake development and testing of a National Emergency Department Admissions Prediction Tool.
Queensland Premier Anna Bligh announced the grant as a means to coordinate bed allocation in Queensland hospitals. “At present there is no off-the-shelf software in Australia that allows hospitals to properly predict the in and out flow of patients and monitor the up-to-date usage of hospital beds,” she said when announcing the grant.
The idea is to develop a tool that can enable workers to access bed availability immediately, without having to interrupt other work processes. By applying tools for predicting the likely amount of admissions in any given day, hospital emergency rooms can begin to tackle common challenges present in hospital emergency rooms.
“As well as decreasing overcrowding in emergency departments, it aims to reduce the regular by-passing of ambulances to other hospitals due to unforeseen demand,” said Bligh. “It also has enormous potential to be implemented in other Australian hospitals.”
Already the Gold Coast Hospital has housed a pilot study involving clinicians and proven it could be possible to one day predict admissions in any given day. Along with Toowoomba Hospital, Gold Coast Hospital will continue to test the software over the next 12 months.