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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