Bed Management 4.0

31/03/2023

The Project

The appropriate availability of a hospital bed is an essential prerequisite for everyday operations of a hospital. Unfortunately, providing the right type of bed--in a cleaned and disinfected condition--with fresh bed linen and functional equipment--at the desired location and in sufficient numbers, is often an unattainable wish in hospital operations. On a regular basis, there are no inventory lists of beds available. If so, they are usually not maintained. One rarely knows where a bed is located at a specific time and date. In practice, it often happens that a bed is not cleaned before a technician repairs or maintains it. To counteract this situation, the following questions arose: Is it possible to offer a holistic, lifecycle-oriented, needs-oriented bed management that guarantees the hospital a technically and hygienically perfect bed at the right time and in the right place? Is it possible to offer the entire process from procurement to logistics, processing, technology, and disposal from a single source? How can such a service be integrated into an ongoing hospital system? ...to answer these and many other questions, this research project has been launched.

The Implementation

Goal: embedding the process into the digital world

An IT system which:

connects devices and users involved with each other (communication)

collects all relevant information (information)

processes the information using algorithms (computation)

can be controlled and therefore managed in a central software (control).

The aim is to develop a scalable, manufacturer-independent platform that can be adapted to the needs of hospitals, which is sufficiently open for further future developments, e.g. can be used as a preliminary stage for a robot system controlled by artificial intelligence, and is flexible enough to be used in many different infrastructures to be able to be used. It primarily supports process-controlled bed management, can also show additional added value for patients and / or medical professionals, and can guarantee the organization as the operator a "technically and hygienically perfect bed" at all times.

This will be done together with users in a hospital:

an innovative target process is defined
a modern hardware infrastructure is developed
a developed software that can be integrated into the hospital system
based on this, a new type of management for one manufacturer-independent overall process control provided

1. Current analysis of the processes at the application partner
Based on multiple inspections and analyzes of occupancy data, the current situation of bed management is collected with all processes and process interface in a partner's hospital.

2. Definition of the ideal target processes
Building on current analysis, the project partners and other healthcare experts define ideal processes throughout the entire life cycle of a bed.

3. Development of hardware and software system
With the ideal processes as a basis, an IT system is developed that consists of non-proprietary parts of hardware and software. The hardware system is used to locate the bed and manipulate the bed conditions. The software system offers the interface to connected systems which will be used in the life cycle of a bed.

4. Management recommendation for adapting clinical processes
The IT system, which is tested and evaluated in a prototype by user partners, in combination with the adaptation of the processes, presents the partners an optimized potential, eventually increasing efficiency and effectiveness of bed management sustainably.