less stress for the NHS

Hi everyone, I am an intensive care nurse and I work for public health in the UK. I have recently taken up a job that involves aiding the transition to a new software called Epic Healthcare.

I would like to anticipate that I have a clinical background but little to none experience with AI and machine learning, sorry if I will butcher terms and concepts in the following post.

I am getting involved in the digital side of patient care which I find really fascinating, although I realise how it is a couple of decades behind in terms of technology and user interface.

One of the problems I am facing at the moment is device integration. A lot of devices are used, especially in intensive care, and their parameters are fed into the electronic health record (EHR) in an hourly cadence in order to assess trends and have a record of the treatment administered.

Most of the devices are connected to the computer at the bedside with a LAN cable, and I believe the IT department do their magic to catalogue the information and for them in the EHR charts, which resemble and excel spreadsheet in a way.

Other devices do not have this privilege, so it becomes the job of the bedside nurses to feed the data into the charts. This job as you can imagine is repetitive and time consuming, and it sounds like a job a machine could do way better than a human operator, and in less time.

So here comes my question, how hard is it actually to create a software that can recognize values, catalogue them, and feed them into the EHR?

One of the features of Epic will be an Android handheld device with an app version of the EHR. The device has a camera. My idea is to be able to hover the camera on the screen of the medical devices, where the parameters are shown, and be able to pull the information into the EHR.

The ideal software wouldn't have to recognize new screens at the first sight, there is a limited amount of devices we are using, some reinforcement and education can be carried out by users before implementation and when a new device is introduced.

It is also worth mentioning that accuracy needs to be high but a degree of error is tolerated; the LAN system is far from perfect, it is responsibility of the bedside nurse to ultimately confirm and sign the information fed into the system.

This solution would save a lot of time to already worn-out nurses and would help us get up to speed in a technological point of view.

I am curious to hear your opinion about it

Lotta love