The Safe Surgery System

Safely, effectively and efficiently tracking a patient's progress through their surgical episode poses a variety of problems for hospital managers. Mistakes are inevitable when using paper-driven processes that rely entirely on repeatedly inputting detailed information, resulting in:

Wrong side and wrong site surgery
No consistent and systematic method of correctly identifying and
tracking patients
No automatic verification of preoperative checks
Meaningful management information buried in reams of paperwork.

But there is now a Safe Surgery System which offers once-only patient information input, and which disseminates that information to clinical and nursing staff at every point in the pre-operative, operative and post-operative stages of care.

The Safe Surgery System delivers significant organisational, clinical, patient and cost benefits:

Clinical governance - electronic audit trail and automated patient safety incident reporting.
Theatre efficiency -10-20% improvement in theatre utilisation and better patient discharge planning to improve bed management.
Performance - more accurate tariffing and rapid ROI.

The system uses a Radio Frequency Identification wristband to track a patient throughout their surgical episode based on a pre-defined electronic checklist.

Theatre process controls include visible and audible messages between clinicians and nursing staff, and surgeons are provided with accurate and up-to-date patient status information, so they can instantly re-order the theatre list to offset potential delays.

Atos Healthcare installs the Safe Surgery System at all key points of surgical care and trains administrative, nursing and clinical staff to use the application as part of a project and change management programme.