Tablet technology is a 'key enabler' to patient experience.
Seth Bokser, MD, a practicing pediatric hospitalist at UCSF Benioff Children's Hospital, and chief medical officer at health technology company Oneview Healthcare, is helping hospitals achieve goals such as improving patient experience using Oneview's IT solution.
Oneview's technology is in use at a number of facilities around the world, including UCSF.
How it works
Oneview's personalized hospital bedside tablets or monitors allow patients to communicate directly with their care team, select and order meals, set and track recovery goals, Skype with family during a clinical consultation, play video games, watch movies, receive patient education, and other functions.
It also integrates with existing hospital systems, such as EHRs, patient portals, and telemedicine.
"The patients are immersed in information when they want it and entertainment and distraction when they need that," Bokser says.
The technology has a "cool" factor for patients, for sure, but that's not enough in and of itself. Instead, Bokser says, the technology solution "needs to be part of a larger quality improvement focus and not just a standalone."
"It's not the be-all and end-all for achieving great clinical outcomes or even great patient experience scores," he says. "But it is a key enabler if it's used in a thoughtful way."
Because Oneview is an open platform, each hospital or health system uses it to reach the specific goals and outcomes on which it's focused.
Bokser says that UCSF has used the platform to advance its goal of empowering patients. He says UCSF has Oneview in every patient room at every patient bedside. There are also Oneview patient education consoles and in other places such as bedside ambulatory infusion and dialysis beds.
In patient rooms, there's a large media wall display as well as a personalized bedside tablet for each patient. Patients can use the tablet to control the media wall or view more personal information—such as treatment details—on the tablet itself.
"Some of healthcare is very private, and we want patients to be educated and understand their disease process and their treatment pathway in as specific a way as possible," he says.
In the UCSF's intensive care nursery, Bokser says Oneview is used to show parents a predischarge educational video. Instead of wheeling in an educational video cart five minutes before discharge, parents can watch the video at their leisure throughout their hospital stay and have the chance to ask questions. It's also expedited discharges, Bokser says.
"The technology shines when it's part of a clinician champion-led change management process," Bokser says.
The Oneview in-room platform can also enable patient empowerment in more subtle ways. For example, the platform interacts with the real-time location tracking on clinicians' ID badges, allowing the provider's picture and name to pop up on the patient's screen when the provider enters the patient room.
"It's a relatively simple thing but it makes a world of difference for patients who are in a vulnerable position," Bokser says. "It's all around patient empowerment in the room."
Patients can also use the platform to write down question to ask their care team, search the Internet, and direct self-service requests like requesting extra pillows directly from housekeeping.'
“We want to start using the in-room platform to drive efficiency as well, taking the nurse out of the middle of communication," and freeing up nurses for clinical work, Bokser says.
But for Bokser, the most important moments are ones where the technology plays a supporting role in making human connections. He recalls an emergent surgery at UCSF on a child from another country during which the mother couldn't get to the hospital in time for the surgery to begin.
When the surgeon finished, and came out to talk to the family about how it went, Bokser says the mother "greeted him with affection" and said thank you, even though she'd never met him and English wasn't her first language. That's because Oneview is deployed at UCSF in several different languages and the mother had seen the surgeon's picture on the platform's display screen.
"It engenders not only knowledge and empowerment but intimacy," he says. "[Patients] feel like there's technology in their room that is truly designed for them and understands them."
Alexandra Wilson Pecci is an editor for HealthLeaders.
