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<< Previous   of   Next >>   ADVERTISEMENT   CONTACT THE HERALD Robert Frank, City Editor frank@heraldnet.com   Published: Friday, February 22, 2008 System to help hospitals track available space By Sharon Salyer Herald Writer A new system expected to come to Snohomish County later this year will allow hospitals to find out nearly instantaneously which health care facilities can -- and can't -- take more patients. The system, which also will be launched in King County in June, won't be limited to helping hospitals in the Puget Sound area coordinate and better respond to injured or sick patients during disasters. It will help with more day-to-day problems, like those that occurred last week. Complications from flu and other winter viruses had many hospitals in Snohomish County and throughout the Puget Sound region periodically filled to capacity. No beds were available for new patients. Now, hospital staff rely on a 10-year-old Internet system that sometimes is hours out of date for reports on bed space throughout the region. With the current system, "you get a snapshot, an idea of what it looks like at 6 or 7:30 in the morning," said Julie Zarn, clinical director of emergency services at Providence Everett Medical Center. That leaves hospitals trying to figure out the information "one phone call at a time" on where the patient might be transferred, she said. The goal is to have a statewide system to allow all Washington hospitals to quickly know what facilities are available for transfers, said Cassie Sauer, spokeswoman for the Washington State Hospital Association. In Washington last year, nearly 11,000 patients were transferred from one hospital to another, mostly from smaller, rural hospitals to larger hospitals with more types of specialty care, she said. The new tracking system will first be tested in King County's 23 hospitals. If that goes smoothly, plans call for it to be expanded to Snohomish and Pierce counties. King County's system is expected to provide more than just up-to-date-information on which hospitals can accept emergency room patients or those needing to be transferred to burn units or critical care facilities or for medical or surgical treatments. It will have an alerting system to show which hospitals are getting close to saturation, said Cynthia Dold, a manager working for a health care coalition in King County that is helping coordinate the new system. That will allow hospitals to respond, taking steps such as moving up the discharge time for patients by a few hours, freeing up hospital beds to try to thwart a problem before a logjam occurs, said Chris Martin, administrative director for emergency and trauma services at Harborview Medical Center in Seattle. "It's nice to be able to plan for that in a number of hours, instead of having seven hospitals on divert, which means every other hospital has five ambulances in their driveway," Martin said. Paramedics transporting trauma and other patients with health emergencies will be able to call one number to find out which area hospital has an available bed, Martin said. The system will allow for better long-term planning by allowing hospitals to track how often and for how long hospitals are closed to admitting new patients or have an overload in emergency rooms, Dold said. It also will have a feature allowing hospitals to track medical supplies. So if there's a natural disaster or flu pandemic, they can see which area hospitals have stocks of a specific medicine. A similar hospital information tracking system in Minnesota helped coordinate emergency response after the Minneapolis bridge collapse last year, Dold said. The current Web-based information tracking system, operated by Harborview Medical Center, will continue to operate until the switch-over is complete, Martin said. "We're excited," Martin said. When disasters occur, "we would call Pierce and Snohomish County for help. To have a more coordinated approach just makes sense." Herald reporter Sharon Salyer at 425-339-3486 or salyer@heraldnet.com.

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