Client Story

Challenge

With a workforce of 10,000, Singapore General Hospital (SGH) accounts for about a quarter of the total acute hospital beds in the public sector and about one-fifth of acute beds nationwide.

Managing limited resources is one of the greatest operational challenges faced by hospitals around the world. SGH, which constantly seeks new ways to improve its processes and streamline resources, saw an opportunity in leveraging technology to enhance its bed management system, and therein improve its patient flow process from admission to discharge.

Previously, the bed status information in the hospital information system relied on manual updates by staff. Since staff may be busy, such information may not be updated in realtime. This meant that operations teams and bed management units did not have clear visibility of the real-time bed statuses, and had to spend time making phone calls to ascertain the status of beds and patients’ whereabouts.

Results

Altera Patient Flow within the Sunrise EMR platform provides SGH with an integrated suite of solutions for bed management that can help optimise capacity planning and discharge forecasting.

This enables SGH to improve patient throughput and communication while increasing overall efficiency and resource utilisation.

Key improvements include:

• Patient movements are captured at source so that real-time bed availability is known
• Real-time bed status readily available throughout the hospital
• Integrated with RFID technology