2013 Press Releases
UCC develops electronic National Early Warning Scorecard
Researchers at University College Cork (UCC) have developed an electronic early-warning scorecard to help medical staff identify deteriorating patients which may improve patient outcomes.
The electronic National Early Warning Scorecard is currently on trial across a number of acute hospital settings.
The paper based version of the National Early Warning Scorecard was introduced by the Health Service Executive’s (HSE) across all acute hospitals in 2011/12 as a patient safety measure. This is to help overcome the potential for the late detection of patient deterioration. If not identified early enough there can be a number of serious consequences for patient care along with increased healthcare costs, medical staff workload, and greater strain on hospital resources.
The electronic National Early Warning Scorecard (e-NEWS) enables doctors and nurses to undertake a systematic approach to the identification and management of deteriorating patients to improve their outcome. e-NEWS provides a suite of intelligent decision support interfaces, built on a number of mobile platforms, which can integrate signals from remote medical devices such as wireless body area networks and patient sensors developed by the Tyndall National Institute along with patient devices from OmronTM, GE HealthcareTM and PhilipsTM. This will provide healthcare professionals with a more accurate and timely picture of the status of their patient, enabling them to implement clinical care earlier which will improve patient outcomes and recovery time. It will also ease the workload of nursing and medical staff by automating patient monitoring and reporting in acute settings.
The project is being led by Professor Frédéric Adam (Principal Investigator) and a team of researchers at the Health Information Systems Research Centre (HISRC), University College Cork including Dr John O’Donoghue, Dr Simon Woodworth, Dr Tom O’Kane, Siobhán O’Connor and Fred Creedon. They received direct funding from Science Foundation Ireland (SFI) and the HSE to develop this tablet PC clinical decision support software solution. The software has been under development for the last eighteen months and is now being tested at St. Luke’s General Hospital, Kilkenny and Nenagh General Hospital, Tipperary. Professor Garry Courtney, Consultant Gastroenterologist and Clinical Director at St. Luke’s says: “The future now is not in responding to cardiac arrest or crash calls: it is in preventing them. We have introduced the Electronic National Early Warning Score into our Acute Medical Assessment Unit in St. Luke’s which is always very busy. The aim is to free up nurses from doing manual measurements of blood pressure, pulse and temperature which will now be done electronically. The electronic triggers will alert nursing staff to the patients who need further assessment. This will allow nurses to devote more of their time to extremely ill patients.”