Improving Patient Throughput by Streamlining the Surgical Care-Pathway Process

The delivery of a patient, to the operating theatre, in every hospital, consists of several heterogeneous departments working synchronously via communicating and sharing information, in relation to the current state of a patient’s care, as they travel through the surgical care-path way. The surgical care-pathway typically starts at admissions and finishes as the patient is leaving recovery. The problem being, as a patient navigates the care-pathway, there are numerous risk factors in the forms of technical, environmental and human that can influence a delay in the delivery of care. This paper will discuss these risk factors and highlight different approaches taken by several authors to address such issues. Additionally, a software application will be discussed that has being developed by the author that uses portable mobile devices, to address similar issues, for a private health care provider in the south of Ireland. The results of implementing the new solution show a potential decrease in patient throughput time and an overall increase of task visibility, across the surgical care-pathway.