Smartphones To Help Streamline Medical Care At Woodbridge Hospital

Health & Fitness

Smartphones To Help Streamline Medical Care At Woodbridge Hospital Sentara is equipping clinicians with smartphones to help staff provide the medical care process with fewer devices.

WOODBRIDGE, VA — Smartphones are a part of everyday lives, and that counts in hospitals too. Sentara Health is launching a smartphone program to better facilitate medical care. The smartphones will be distributed in 11 Sentara hospitals in Virginia, including Sentara Northern Virginia Medical Center in Woodbridge, and one future hospital.

The nearly 6,000 smartphones across the hospital system will help with quicker admissions to the emergency department, reduce hospital length of stay, and accelerate the average nurse response time, according to Sentara. The hospital system expects radiology scans to have an improved turnaround time, and ambient noise from devices to be lessened.

"This phone improves workflow and patient safety," said Christy Grabus, chief nursing officer at Sentara Northern Virginia Medical Center "All of this helps us prioritize and spend more time at the bedside with our patients. A major benefit is that clinicians no longer need multiple devices like a walkie-talkie, basic phone, pager, and a computer cart to do their jobs."

According to Sentara, smartphones integrate with its electronic medical record system Epic, allowing staff to add patient data in real time, as well as scan medications and labs, take pictures of wounds, and validate device data.

"Giving a patient medication through an IV pump has gone from 80 steps to just 10 steps," said Madison Carrara, a nurse and senior IT specialty analyst at Sentara. "Nurses used to have to walk around the room four or five times to scan everything. Now with the phone, they can walk up to the bedside, scan the patient, medication, and pump all from the same spot."

The smartphones will be HIPAA complaint and secure to protect patient health information and will not have access to cell service, social media, games or the app store. Data will not be stored on the phones, which will be rendered unusable if they leave the hospital.

To help patients understand the new smartphone program, Sentara is adding signage explaining their purpose in patient rooms.

Sentara has started to distribute smartphones to staff and expects its 11 Virginia hospitals will have all smartphones supplied by the end of 2024. Another location, Sentara Albemarle Medical Center in Elizabeth City, North Carolina, will get the smartphones when construction is complete in 2025.