Case Study - St Mary's Hospital

Surgeons at St Mary's Hospital, Paddington, one of the UK's leading teaching and research hospitals, were able to deliver faster, more efficient patient care, and communicate more effectively within the surgical team, using a Workstream-based mobile patient management solution running on Palm PDA mobile phones.

The Workstream-based software was piloted by a team of nine surgeons, working under the direction of Professor Sir Ara Darzi, FMedSci, as part of an investigation into the usefulness of PDAs.

The Workstream software was used to initiate and track hospital tests ordered by surgeons, and to capture data about patients – such as diagnosis – generated by the doctors during treatment. Data was entered or retrieved via the PDAs through a web-based interface also developed in Workstream. Several reference resources – including a drug interaction database, the British National Formulary, evidence-based medicine guidelines, and other hospital protocols – were loaded onto the PDA alongside the Workstream system.

The PDA-based system was compared with the hospital's existing combination of conventional alphanumeric pagers and a legacy patient management system. In every case, surgeons responded more quickly to messages when they were using a PDA rather than a pager, with significantly more messages answered within five minutes using the PDAs. More than two thirds of the surgeons felt having the PDA-based Workstream system meant they could deliver faster, more efficient patient care. The same number also felt PDAs enhanced communication between members of the team, and with other care professionals.

The team behind the pilot is now planning a larger trial to make the case for more widespread adoption of PDAs within hospitals.

Workstream was particularly suited to the needs of St Mary's Hospital because of:

• its ability to deliver a sophisticated and robust application, which could be easily integrated with legacy hospital systems, in just six weeks

• its cost-effective pricing, which would have allowed the hospital to recoup the cost of the system within a year if rolled out on a permanent basis

• its support for an intuitive web-based interface which ensured even clinicians reluctant to learn how to use a new system were able to get to grips with it during the short period of the trial