INCOMING!—A Web Tracking Application for PACU and Post-Surgical Patients

BackgroundCapacity constraints necessitate improving hospital efficiency. An integrated real time system facilitating patient flow between the post-anesthesia care unit (PACU) and surgical ward would ease PACU workload by reducing the effort of discharging patients.MethodsWe developed INCOMING!, a web-based platform that monitors patient progress from the operating room to the PACU. INCOMING! integrates available data, automatically determining when a patient enters the PACU. An automated paging system alerts clinical unit managers to ‘pull’ their patients from the PACU after a set recovery period. General surgery patients were included in the INCOMING! system in late 2004 with paging added in mid-March 2005. Mean PACU length of stay was calculated for the intervention group (general surgery patients with INCOMING!) and compared to a control group (general surgery patients without INCOMING!) and an orthopedic surgery group before and after paging.ResultsThe system successfully gathers data and generates automated pages when events occur. After paging, there was a significant difference between the orthopedic surgery control group and the general surgery intervention group (235 min versus 185 min, P = 0.001). The mean PACU LOS decreased in the INCOMING! intervention group by 26 min while the mean LOS increased by 28 min in the general surgery control group (P = 0.27).ConclusionPilot implementation demonstrates that INCOMING! performs the desired integration and automatic notification. Given the minimal cost and potential large gains from a wider deployment, we plan to implement the system for all PACU patients and all post-PACU care units.