IRCCS – ISMETT Wins Digital Innovation in Health Care Award

UPMC-managed ISMETT receives a prestigious award from the Polytechnic University of Milan for its newly designed resource planning optimization tool

Palermo, May 8, 2017 – ISMETT, a leading Italian transplant center, managed by UPMC, in Palermo, Italy, has won the Digital Innovation in Health Care Award from the Polytechnic University of Milan’s School of Management in the “Managerial and Administrative Processes” category. The goal of the award is to highlight the best national health care projects that use digital technologies as a driver for innovation and improvement.

ISMETT won the competition with a project for the development of a system to calculate and optimize nursing workload distribution and facilitate staff allocation.

“This is a proactive system,” said Giuseppe Arena, Chief Nursing Officer of ISMETT, “and is based on parameters in the electronic medical record and on the Nursing Care Score (NCS) system to electronically quantify the level of care required for each patient. Electronic data are then sent to all unit coordinators. This allows us to have a complete picture of the workload for each unit, making a more equal distribution across the units and the hospital possible.”

This system has allowed for a better nursing staff allocation, and has significantly reduced the amount of overtime work and the number of service orders (from 57 in 2014 to 4 in 2016). In addition, medication-related errors have decreased from 1.1% in 2014 to 0.5% in 2015, and reached 0 in 2016. Interestingly, hospital-acquired infection rates have also gone down: from 9.9% in 2014 to 8.5% in 2015, and to 7.5% in 2016.

An improvement has also been recorded in the patient satisfaction rate with regard to nursing care (72% in 2014, 83% in 2015, and 86% in 2016).

As a result of this recognition, ISMETT has submitted a patent application to the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) and seeks to focus on further developments of the project: a new function for automatic nurse-patient assignment through an interface with the human resource management system, as well as the implementation of the system in other hospitals. The system can be successfully implemented in any hospital that uses an electronic medical record.