DNP 805 Emerging Technologies

Among the most important aspects of patient care in hospitals are improved care, access, and patient safety. However, one challenge in most healthcare facilities that threaten better care delivery through delays is patient flow. The challenges with the growing capacity that faces health systems cause patients to suffer due to limited access to care and delays that come up between transitions of care. One of the emerging technologies that have a big potential in overcoming the challenges to improve quality and patient outcomes by overcoming the emerging barriers to care is hospital centralized command centers (Kane et al., 2019). This technology gives advanced registered nurses in collaboration with other professionals to manage capacity, clinical technology, and supplies.

An Overview of the Technology

Centralized command centres is an emerging technology that uses software applications like dashboards to offer real-time updates concerning the healthcare facility. Through analysis of real-time data, the nurses and doctors can immediately become aware of available rooms in the ward, patients to be discharged, patients that need to be transferred to more advanced care, among other things (Roth, 2018). Besides, the centralized command centre also used real-time hospital data to manage the hospital’s capacity. Even though in the past, incident command centres were formed with the aim of temporarily helping health centres to manage various operations in the event that emergencies such as natural disasters occur, centralized command centres are emerging as a more durable operational model to help nurses and physicians manage the complex activities involved in the daily patient care.

The Purpose of Centralized Command Centre in Healthcare

As an emerging technology in healthcare, the centralized command centre is characterized by high sophistication and hinges on interdisciplinary teams’ co-location and real-time data analytics to achieve the goal of better patient outcomes. A centralized command centre can have the purpose of improving patient outcomes through focusing on timely detection of the patient at risk of conditions like infection and deterioration and mitigating such risk through computer algorithms. The analyzed data can then be integrated across the facility’s electronic platforms to boost a rapid reporting of the risk status of a patient, prompting a timely response from the nurses. The centralized command centre may also serve the purpose of improving the healthcare facility’s efficiency by lowering waiting times like in the emergency department boarding.

How Centralized Command Centre Would Function in Health Care Setting

Even though a centralized command centre in a hospital facility can help in coordinated every department and resource in the hospital, central to an advanced registered nurse practice is the coordination of patient care. Therefore, this emerging technology would function in the health care setting by controlling quality and coordinating care from a central point that used sophisticated devices and real-time data processing for prompt decision making to improve patient outcomes (Kane et al., 2019). For instance, through the technology, nurses would effectively know which patient is ready for discharge or needs more care and then smoothly facilitate the needed processes. Central to supporting patient care coordination and quality control is the control of the facility’s level of efficiency and flow. Thus, this technology would function in a health care setting by reducing boarding times and maximizing bed capacity. In some instances, patients may need to be transferred to higher hospitals for specialized care. The centralized command centre would function in that regard to boost coordination between the healthcare facilities by transfer orchestration and communication facilitation between the two or groups of health care facilities.

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Ethical Issue That May Accompany the Use of Centralized Command Centre Technology

Since the centralized command centre technology may, in some cases, use predictive data analytics, legal and ethical issues are bound to occur. One of the ethical issues that can accompany the use of this technology is patient data privacy. Since the use of this technology involves, among other things, the use of patient data and their real-time analysis, the issue of patient information privacy comes in (Price & Cohen, 2019). Ethical standards require that patient’s information should be kept private and confidential, something that real-time data analytics and even predictive data analysis may violate.

How Technology Improve Access to Care and Promote Patient Safety and Quality

The use of a centralized command centre ensures that the nurses, in collaboration with other care teams, effectively manage the hospital’s capacity (“Confronting,” 2018). Such management is efficiently done through real-time monitoring of bed spaces in various hospital units. The result is improved capacity leading to care access to patients that could have been turned away for lack of space. Through the use of advanced technology such as artificial intelligence and predictive analytics, the centralized command centre is able to offer real-time data concerning incoming patients and the likely departments such as the emergency department as well as discharges hence improving and making more efficient the process of admission. Through the use of this technology, patients who need advanced care are promptly identified and appropriate action taken, which helps in improving patient safety and care.

Conclusion

In conclusion, the future of better patient outcomes and safety lies in the hands of emerging technologies. This paper has discussed the use of a centralized command centre as an emerging technology in healthcare. By efficiently implementing and using it, hospitals have higher chances of improving patient care and access.

References

Confronting the Hospital Capacity (2018). https://www.epic.com/epic/post/confronting-

hospital-capacity-puzzle-real-time-dashboards.

Kane, E. M., Scheulen, J. J., Püttgen, A., Martinez, D., Levin, S., Bush, B. A., … & Efron, D. T. (2019). Use of systems engineering to design a hospital command center. The Joint Commission Journal on Quality and Patient Safety, 45(5), 370-379. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jcjq.2018.11.006

Price, W. N., & Cohen, I. G. (2019). Privacy in the age of medical big data. Nature medicine, 25(1), 37-43. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41591-018-0272-7.

Roth, M (2018). https://www.healthleadersmedia.com/innovation/move-over-star-wars-hospital-command-centers-take-spotlight

DNP 805 Emerging Technologies