Abstract
Stay Left, Shift Left -10x (SL2-10X) is a new Digital Health paradigm which seeks to introduce digital and technology innovations which deliver 10X benefits to healthcare in hospitals and move healthcare towards the Home. This case features the adoption of Trimedika Tritemp non contact infrared thermometer demonstrating 10X benefits in the hospital and home settings.
There has been little innovation in Thermometry in years until the introduction of the TriTemp thermometer, development of which was stimulated by the need to avoid disturbing patients during sleep to have their temperature taken. Tritemp delivers 10X benefits across all four dimensions of the quadruple aim, reducing infection risk, improving nursing productivity, improving accuracy, eliminating plastic consumables whilst offering less disruption for the patient and delivering a case for system wide adoption.
As an end-of-life-carer for her sister she experienced the distress caused by contact thermometers and developed a hospital grade non-contact thermometer for critical patients especially in neonatal, paediatric, oncology, renal and surgical wards to minimise infection risk.
This paper was prepared to assess the overall impact of implementing the TriTemp non-contact thermometer into hospitals on costs, healthcare professionals time, infection risk for patients, and sustainability.
First challenge was how to introduce an improved new device into the daily workflow and Tritemp delivered improvements in economic, environmental, and social sustainability.
This challenge was overcome by building working partnerships with clinical engineering and medical teams with a shared goal of improving efficiencies and sustainability, enhancing clinical and patient experiences and delivering cost savings.
Sustainability
Consumable plastic waste costs are high for contact thermometers and goes against HSE’s commitment to sustainability. (HSE Sustainable Development report 2018/19).
A 900-bed hospital uses around 2-3 million plastic probe covers/year, equivalent to 6 commercial skips of plastic waste. Tritemp breakages were negligible (<0.5%) compared with 10 contact thermometers breakages/week.
Costs
Each plastic probe cover cost 5c and a hospital taking 2 million readings per year saves €100,000 on plastic consumables. TriTemp was rolled out across 200 locations in Ireland with 10x cost savings to healthcare sites when costs doubled due to an international shortage of materials.
Staff Time
A nurse takes 6 minutes for temperature reading with contact thermometers compared to 1 minute (6 X improvement) with TriTemp, giving nurses back time to care.
One hospital reported a saving of 500 Engineering hours for the first years use of TriTemp due to minimal maintenance and robustness of the device. Overall results showed a saving of 16 Nurse FTEs and 1.58 Engineer FTEs /yr for an 800 bed hospital.
Patient Comfort
Results indicated 80% of Nurses agreed that TriTemp was more comfortable for the patients and a Nurse user satisfaction score of 91%.
Conclusions
TRITEMP™ is a precision-engineered tool, designed to positively impact and better manage infection spread across healthcare. Future developments include a connected non-contact TriTemp enabling rapid transfer of data to the patient record via BLE.
The results show 10x cost savings and can improve the lives of patients and nurses helping hospitals, healthcare systems and the planet.