NEW DELHI: All Indian Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), New Delhi on Saturday launched a “main hospital casualty dashboard” on its website to show real time updates on status of emergency beds and the wait time for patients for admissions. The dashboard was launched during a high level meeting of heads of various Delhi based hospitals to discuss the issue of better coordination between them for effectively handling emergency patients.
While emphasising on the need of real time emergency bed availability in all the hospitals and a unified integrated dashboard for bed status, officials during the meeting agreed that a network to communicate between hospitals before referrals should be established.
A two-way referral of critical and non-critical cases and a training programme should also be developed to achieve expertise, said director M Srinivas while adding that such a dashboard is required in every hospital, besides an integrated unified dashboard that shows availability of beds in all the hospitals to the patients.
The medical directors, medical superintendents of 13 central and Delhi government hospitals including Safdarjung hospital, RML, IHBAS and others participated in the meeting and agreed with the concept of having such a dashboard.
The director further emphasized the formation of a “human network” wherein all hospitals will have nodal officers in their emergencies for efficient communication with other hospitals regarding availability of beds and clinical status of patients being referred. He suggested formulation of a mechanism of two-way referral of patients— the hospital with lesser expertise can send their critical patients to higher centres while higher centres can refer their stable emergency patients to hospitals with general specialities.
To develop expertise in the field of handling emergency critical cases in their respective hospitals, the institute proposed customized training programmes for hospital staff which can be one week to one year long as per resources.
Other points which were discussed during the meeting were — “Video teleconsultation” for patients in emergency requiring consultation from super specialists and ways for optimization of resources.
Besides, “Patient tracker system” was showcased by AIIMS New Delhi, where the doctors can see the current status of their patient in emergency, including the status of pending investigations and referral calls to specialty departments.
According to AIIMS administration, other initiatives to be taken by the institute includes Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) enabled waiting hall for the patients’ attendants, Video calling/ between patients and attendants.
