Live Hospital Information system: A Novel Real-time Bed Management Approach from Admission to Discharge

For a long time, challenges related to hospital management have been one of the most important concerns of governments. These challenges involve the medical staff and health policy makers more than ever during crises such as the Covid -19 pandemic and seasonal influenza. Lack of hospital beds, lack of special care facilities, lack of medical staff and rapid reduction of drug stock are among the most important problems that occur in critical situations. Designing and implementing management approaches based on snow processing and using the existing potentials to evaluate the condition of hospitals on a macro level can greatly reduce the incidence of such problems.

In this research, an attempt was made to avoid the aforementioned problems by using a new and technological approach in hospital information management and a macro view in evaluating the facilities and limitations of medical centers on the one hand and the electronic health record architecture on the other hand. Setting up an online system for sending and receiving the status of hospital beds live in the hospital management systems and the central headquarters of the Ministry of Health in the context of the electronic health record is the first step and adopting macro management approaches to use the available treatment capacities for optimal patient coverage is the second step.

This system was launched nationally based on the current platform of Iran›s electronic health records and was done at a low cost. Collecting patient data in the 3 stages of admission, treatment and discharge, while facilitating the monitoring of the utilization of hospital beds, helps to enrich the content of the electronic health record, as well as the launch of online management-supervisory dashboards.

The monitoring of the status of hospital visits, full and empty beds, as well as the daily discharge rate of hospitals could be monitored offline and with a delay, which was improved by presenting a new model compared to previous resource management efforts.