We’ve already mentioned how electronic whiteboards can benefit your school or business in theory. But what about in practice? Everyone loves a good case study, and I recently found a story about a hospital in Canada using electronic whiteboards to help treat patients.
Electronic whiteboards help with a process called triage, where nurses go around to check on patients’ conditions and decide who needs the most immediate treatment. As you can guess, hospitals are big, you have a lot of patients to treat, and time is of the essence. At Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario (CHEO), emergency room nurses go around with tablet devices and check up on patients. Using automated point-and-click prompts, the nurses enter in and record patient information. The records then get displayed on an electronic whiteboard for everyone to see, kind of like the flight schedule at an airport. In addition, the information goes to all the computers around the hospital so anyone can read it and use it. One doctor notes that the hospital “had a standard whiteboard before, but it was only helpful if you were standing in front of it” and says that “having the information available to [staff] when [they] need it and wherever [they] need it” is especially exciting.
“It also adds legibility to the work,” says Steve Lozanski, one of the triage system developers. When doctors and nurses run around the hospital, they often scribble down messy notes on paper that can make critical information hard to read. Typing the information or writing it into a tablet device with character recognition software and displaying it on an electronic whiteboard helps ensure that nothing gets lost in translation. Look for more hospitals and medical institutions to follow CHEO’s lead in the near future.
Posted by Taeho Lim
