By Regina Ciardiello, Managing Editor, VSR  

When St. Joseph's Health Care, a London, Ontario, Canada-based patient care, teaching and research center wanted to be able to deploy a real-time, HIPAA-compliant, barcoding system to help Neonatology professionals eliminate patient misidentification and medical mismatches of breast milk in the Neonatology Intensive Care Unit, it called upon Timeless Medical Systems. The Canadian-based company, which develops advanced software applications, hardware and IT systems for health-care professionals, helped St. Joseph's in the deployment of its Mother's Own Milk System (MOMS). The wireless, browser-based client server utilizes Motorola MC70 Enterprise Digital Assistants.

Since the NICU at St. Joseph's specializes in the care of premature newborn infants, part o this care also includes the feeding of a mother's expressed breast milk, which is stored on-site to these infants. John Rowe, president of Timeless Medical Systems, led the team that deployed MOMS to run on the MC70 devices. "The entire process of storage and administration of breast milk at St. Joseph's is managed by the Mother's Own Milk System (MOMS)," says Rowe. "The system provides a comprehensive audit trail with in-depth reporting capabilities to ensure regulatory compliance. In addition, the standardized and customized reports provided by MOMS have assisted St. Joseph's in eliminate paperwork by giving them the ability to print out needed information at the click of a button."

Since deploying MOMS in January 2007, St. Joseph's has saved staff time by eliminating the need for double and triple "visual" checking by staff to see if a baby's patient band matches that of the bottle to be fed.

All of the information is updated wirelessly, in real-time across the entire system so caregivers at St. Joseph's are equipped with the most up-to-date information. This allows them the ability to determine which babies have already been fed or instantly find bottle locations via the Motorola MC70 EDAs as they walk the unit floor.

"Everything is barcoded at each point in the (feeding) process," says Cindy Ulrich, a registered dietician at St. Joseph's NICU. "Overall, it has been very effective for us, and decreases breast milk errors and increases safety. We always need to ensure that that each infant is receiving the correct milk and that there are no errors, and MOMS is a novel technology that helps to accomplish that."

While MOMS is designed for its efficiency and elimination of errors, it was not intended to replace existing workflows, but rather complement them, within the NICU. This was accomplished by using Timeless Medical Systems' proprietary technologies in conjunction with the MC70 EDAs. Timeless has worked with St. Joseph's NICU to customize MOMS to seamlessly adapt to their current best practices. "Our goal is to roll out something that's not going to be a complete upheaval," says Rowe.

"St. Joseph's has been instrumental in the development of MOMS because they are one of our early adopters, and they've helped us in many ways as we've gone through multiple integrations...our success is due in large part to them.

Rowe also credits Motorola, of whom he has an exclusive four-year partnership. Since his company is based in Prince Edward Island, Canada, Rowe's company works with both the U.S. and Canadian Motorola teams, and he says they have been able to bring the MOMS product to market in part because of the support that Timeless has received from Motorola. "Our No. 1 goal is to improve and help mature patient safety through the use of barcoding technologies through MOMS to help reduce errors to 'zero'," he says. "We want to ensure that the right express milk is being administered to the correct infant, and through the use of MOMS, human error will be eliminated."

End User:
St. Joseph's NICU

Solution Provider:
Timeless Medical Systems

Vendor:
Motorola

Solution:
A real-time barcoding system to help Neonatology professionals eliminate patient misidentification and medical mismatches of breast milk.

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