With their new cloud platform, Acuity Link hopes to bring efficiency and reliability to medical transport teams and their patients. The software focusses on transport, but will contribute to the overall effectiveness of healthcare institutions — improved patient experiences, better clinical outcomes and efficient bed utilization.
Hospitals can achieve efficiencies from the automation of non-emergency transport bookings. One recent project in Denmark addressed concerns with recordkeeping for ambulance and emergency medical teams and poor coordination between paramedics and hospital staff. This was achieved using digital tracking systems.
While tracking is a step forward, there is room for more sophisticated solutions. To address this, Acuity Link has launched a new cloud-based software platform. The software is a discharge workflow tool, the aim of which is to assist healthcare institutions to effectively manage discharges through booking non-emergency transportation.
Alex Theoharidis, who is the CEO of Acuity Link. In communication with Digital Journal, the entrepreneur explains: “The process for ordering a non-emergency ambulance and discharging a patient has essentially been stuck in the 1970’s and was booked almost entirely by phone, until now.”
He adds: “Prior to our software, hospital administrators and clinicians would need to pick up the phone, potentially call several non-emergency transport companies, and relay information that could easily be misunderstood or documented improperly, which required valuable and lengthy periods of time from clinicians and medical transportation dispatch personnel.”
In contrast, with the implementation of Acuity Link healthcare administrators are able to request, schedule and track patient non-emergency medical transportation via a web-browser. The entire process can be tracked in real time. Efficiencies are built-in by ambulance crews being connected to the main Acuity Link system, housed in the core hospital, via a smartphone. This enables ambulance crews can quickly respond to new transport requests. It is also possible for the paramedics to receive a briefing of the clinical details pertaining to the patient. Through such technologies, medics can escalate care, ensure a very rapid response, and make sure patients are treated quickly by the right specialist doctor.
A further innovation with digital technology is the use of geo-location which allow for real-time tracking of how a crew are responding to a transportation request. The wider collection of big data can be used by healthcare executives to assess response performance, fitting into the digital transformation of healthcare services.
