Connectivity and solution thinking - a clinical advantage for a critical care environment

Dr. Eyal Golan, Division Lead, Critical Care at Mackenzie Health is often busy with patients who require coordinated care and a wide variety of support equipment. A complex setup requires careful attention to detail to be certain all systems are working together as they should, providing the specific data required. If they do not communicate properly, manual intervention is necessary.

Dr. Golan describes the effort, “So typically an ICU patient might need a ventilator, and a catheter that goes into their neck or somewhere else to give them medications for effective life support. We use the drip machines. We may use some advanced modalities as well to keep the heart going. Dialysis – all the monitors, all the rhythms – everything. We use it to titrate up and down to make sure the patient gets through what whatever acute illness they are going through to get them back hopefully the way they were.

If systems don't communicate with each other – the devises, the ventilator, the monitors, the drip machines. If they don't communicate, you have to do yourself. Then it's very easy to make mistakes. It's also time consuming.”

“Working with the Philips solution allows us to be more efficient,” says Dr. Golan. “It allows us to spend more time taking care of patients and less time documenting, less time worrying about how this system or that system works.

As an example – earlier where I just finished doing a sedation on a patient that was almost three hours long, I didn't have to sit down and check off their vitals every few minutes. I just did what I had to do and at the end of the procedure I clicked one button and it took all the data for that three-hour period and popped it into a note, then I just signed it. The fact that I could just do that and not worry about everything else, that was key.”

Amir Soheili, Associate Vice President, Clinical Support Services believes the opportunities for coordinated care are obvious, “Interoperability, I think, that’s where this Philips solutions-based approach comes to light. This is where we need to be able to work out everything from beginning to the end. We need to map out all of the different workflows connection points, points where systems will need to talk to each other, where people need to talk to each other, and this is where the solutions-based approach comes into play.”