The impact of mobile technology in hospitals on patient care management and clinical practice

Staff in some hospitals in Wales are using mobile technology, rather than paper-based forms, to record patient observations. This information, collected at the bedside, can help medical teams to make well-informed decisions about patient care.

It can give hospital management staff up-to-the-minute information which can assist them with bed management by tracking patient-flow through the system.

Thus, mobile technology has the potential to improve patient care management and clinical practice. However, we don’t actually know what difference it makes. The purpose of this study is to find out whether indeed this technology makes any difference to the management of patient care and how it impacts on professional practice and relationships in the multidisciplinary team.

We will do this by supporting a PhD student firstly to find out from the published literature how technology like this is used and evaluated in other places. Then the student will gather and analyse data from two hospitals where the mobile technology and software is used record patient data.

Information can be fully anonymised (so no-one knows who any of the patients are) and downloaded from the software. It can be analysed to explore patient-flow between wards and in-and-out of the hospitals. But that is only one source of data for this study.

As important, is finding out what staff think of using the mobile technology. Through talking to members of the multidisciplinary teams (nurses, doctors, physiotherapists, occupational therapists, ward clerks) and hospital managers, the student will find out how or whether this up-to-the-minute patient data is used to inform their clinical practice and the decisions they make about patient care, and if it makes any difference to their communication with managers.

What we learn from this study can help others in hospitals across Wales, and more widely, use this technology to best effect.