PAPAGEORGIOU GENERAL HOSPITAL:

The hospital of tomorrow comes today!

The need

The challenge for OTE Group was to develop a digital environment for the operation of the G.H. Papageorgiou in Thessaloniki. Solutions had to be implemented in order to satisfy the needs of its medical, nursing and administrative staff for automatization of their tasks, particularly in relation to their access to medical information from any place and at any time, in an easy and safe way.

Specifically for the doctors there was the need of providing them with specially designed applications that would allow them to check and cross-reference in real-time and remotely medical information.

The solutions

The provided solutions were based on ICT infrastructures including:

Wireless networks were installed in the hospital providing the staff with access (via tablets or smartphones) to the IT systems of the hospital (HIS – Hospital Information System), to patient medical records, as well as to laboratory or to imaging medical examinations. The access can be ensured at any time and from any place, while at the same time free Internet access is allowed to patients and to their escorts.
The upgrading of the existing call center and its expansion to a new IP call center was implemented providing enhanced functions for communication and notification, e.g the Nurse Call System which allows the bidirectional and wireless communication between the nursing staff and the patient at any time.
A bedside terminal was placed next to every hospital bed operating simultaneously as an entertaining, information and supporting unit for the patients and their escorts, and as a supporting tool for the nursing, medical and administrative staff of the hospital, since it allows access to the hospital internal systems.
A service tracking the location of important assets of the hospital is also provided via RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) tags, which allows monitoring in real time.

The benefits

The hospital immediately gained multiple benefits. More specifically, it achieved:

Immediate and easy access of the medical/nursing/administrative staff (via smartphones and tablets) to any required medical information, from any place and at any time.
Improvement of the intra-hospital communications and therefore of the hospital operation.
Immediate reduction of operational expenses as well as of telecommunications costs.
Better management of the hospital assets within the hospital areas.
Optimization of patient satisfaction thanks to the diminishing of the waiting and hospitalization time, as well as to the offered health services.