Bed Management System Development

: The costs of supporting hospitals are rising, bed numbers are falling and a growing population living longer will require more hospital visits over their lifetime. Thus there is a global focus on increasing the efficiency of patient throughput in a hospital. Bed management systems are still commonly paper-based and are effectively memory-less from the hospital point of view. The hospital information systems are typically billing and ordering systems with minimal information on patient movement along the patient pathway. The literature suggests that technology and shared information allow for shared views to model and predict usage to better manage finite resources. Paper-based systems work against this. This paper presents the design considerations for a bed management application developed in conjunction with a local private hospital. The application developed, provides a hospital-wide view of patient and bed status by recording and capturing touchpoints, that is patient-hospital interactions. Furthermore, it captures data electronically such that the data can be used for analysing patient presentation and bed moving with a view to improve bed management and patient throughput.