Winner: ISS ServicePoint – a technology solution for better patient care
Sponsored by: EMCOR UK
ISS ServicePoint is a technological solution for improving patient care by connecting clinical teams with ISS services at the touch of a button.
In 2018, ISS and the NHS identified that medical staff on busy hospital wards had little time to communicate with FM teams. Telephones are often inaccessible so healthcare staff have to leave their patients to raise simple service requests.
ISS developed ServicePoint – digital self-service touchscreen kiosks – and installed them in wards and hospital departments so NHS employees could request services and monitor progress without having to call the helpdesk. The result was more time for medical staff to focus on patient care.
The terminals show the department layout so users can click on an area of the hospital and log a task in 5-20 seconds, compared with two minutes for an average helpdesk phone call.
ServicePoint is an extension of the helpdesk and CAFM system, providing real-time, location-specific information on existing requests. It also gives users a view of service levels and the chance to log their satisfaction levels.
Results gleaned
Roughly 130 units have been deployed at nine hospitals. Every day, around 1,000 people interact with the device more than 8,000 times. Since the launch of ServicePoint in 2019, the NHS has saved more than 2,300 nursing hours, which is the equivalent to 287 eight-hour nursing shifts or 1.4 full time nurses.
Clinicians now have a clear and localised view of what is happening where and when to better request services for a particular space. ServicePoint saves time for medical staff to focus on patient care, but it also provides localised data to support the predictability of demand and costs to better inform future service design.
Best practice learning point
ISS believes that further integration between ISS and NHS Electronic Patient Records has the potential to boost service delivery through better focused patient care. ISS is developing ServicePoint to integrate location-tracking portering technology to show where porters are in the hospital. The technology will help clinical teams determine when a porter will arrive at a patient’s bedside, which will enable better planning for moving patients and retrieving pharmacy items. ServicePoint could also help the patient catering team to identify patients with specific dietary requirements and allergies and offer tailored menu choices while maintaining a food safety record.
Key quote
“The system is convenient, user-friendly and straightforward,” says Maria Casey, senior Nurse at Royal Brompton and Harefield NHS Foundation Trust. “It helps as we don’t have to call the helpdesk. We like that the job request is in real time and we have evidence of when the job was logged.”