Background
Members of the West Miami-Dade County community are underserved when it comes to medical care with ~40% rate of diabetes.
To combat this issue, Baptist Hospital created a pilot program called “Healthy Hub” to offer free biometric checks for community members that may not have insurance or have been to a hospital in a long time.
Problem
As community members come to the hospital monthly to be screened for free, there is a technology gap. These patients are outside of the Health Record System (EPIC is used at Baptist), but something similar enough while still being fast and focused on simple encounters is needed. At the time of our pilot in 2014, there was no iOS-centric platform for storing encounter information that met the needs of the Healthy Hub.
Solution
Our team created an iOS app to be used in these patient encounters Healthy Hub nurses. In addition to the iOS app, I designed an integrated waiting room ‘queue’ screen for TV that was run from an Apple TV device.
Results
The efficiencies gained through the focused app allowed encounters typically taking 30-45 minutes in a clinical setting to be done in 15 minutes. A nurse could screen 30 patients per 8 hour shift, and the portability of information capture on iPads meant we could have 3 nurses working at the same time in the same footprint a typical encounter used.
The Healthy Hub pilot program logged over 7,500 community member encounters in the first 5 months through Baptist Hospital. It was such a success that Baptist was able to secure a grant to expand to 5 area hospitals.
