In a Labor & Delivery (L&D) environment, new mothers that experience hemorrhages are a medical emergency. How clinicians deal with that emergency is critical for the mother’s health. Computer modeling software provides an effective tool to simulate and understand how different treatment processes affects patient care. In order to improve patient safety and quality of care, the department developed a new protocol to request blood and medication supplies for a hemorrhagic mother. This protocol required requesting an additional nurse for the patient and one phone call to the lab for supplies. However, clinicians did not follow the protocol uniformly. This paper describes the data and the model developed at the request of the Medical Director of the Patient Simulation Lab. The model uses data collected from an Electronic Health Record (EHR) system that describes a patient’s encounter from admission to discharge. The model compares instances of two patient care scenarios for coping with a hemorrhagic emergency. The first scenario represented the original state, which included multiple phone calls to the lab. The second scenario employed the communication protocol developed to improve the speed of delivering lab and pharmacy supplies. The pharmacy and lab are included as Labor & Delivery informs them of the patient’s clinical information collected when the mother-to-be arrives in the Labor & Delivery unit alerting both departments of needed supplies quickly. The simulation clearly demonstrated that following the new protocol decreased time from ordering to administering blood supplies and medication. The model provided Labor & Delivery opportunities to experiment with changing variables within the simulation to deliver better care to new mothers and hemorrhagic emergencies.
Employing Modeling and Simulation to Improve Patient Care
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