The implementation of RippleDown Alerts from Pacific Knowledge Systems has significantly increased communications and improved information flow across the Hospital group. According to Dr Zabaleta, the RippleDown System has made it possible to “get information into the hands of a clinician to make a medical decision or save that patient’s life”.
At OhioHealth MedCentral hospital in the USA, the introduction of RippleDown Alerts helped identify, communicate, report and pre-empt patients that are at a high risk of heart failure.
Similarly, to install any software into a pathology laboratory At OhioHealth MedCentral Hospitals, the complexity of tests and the speed with which they need to be delivered created a demand for more sophisticated Information Systems, but as Eugenio Zabaleta, Clinical Chemist at the MedCentral hospital pointed out “We produce a lot of data in the lab, big strings of numbers, and instead of providing all that data to the clinician we use RippleDown to provide information that they can act on.”
Communication has become a tipping point for many health care companies, stating that the best lab results are important but communicating those results across to the clinician to make a medical decision that saves a patient’s life has become paramount. RippleDown Alerts provides reporting to staff to identify patients with a risk of heart failure according to the patients test results. Every in-patient’s risk is calculated, the results are then sent via email to clinical staff. The clinical staff will receive an email along with patient demographics, lab data, test results and any other important information so the clinicians have all the information they need to react and intervene with urgent patients.