PreMETs at Broadmeadows Hospital will move from a call bell system to Medtasker from Tuesday, 20 September. This follows the success of the rollout at Northern Hospital Epping just over 12 months ago.

A PreMET is a clinical review of an inpatient requiring a response by the medical team within 15 minutes.

Feedback from Junior Medical Officers was that the continuous paging noise from the legacy call bell system was disruptive, particularly in the middle of a procedure or a sensitive conversation with another patient. Although PreMETs will no longer be triggered through the call bell system, the bedside call bell system will remain active for MET calls and codes, providing an ongoing safety backup that staff are familiar with.

Medtasker provides better clinical information, two way accountability, automated reminders and the ability to audit – which the call bell based system lacked.

Medtasker is also linked with i.Patient Manager (iPM) to give accurate patient identification and location data. Dr Lachie Hayes, Chief Medical Informatics Officer, said, “Medtasker has allowed the analysis of data to see what PreMETs are being called on each ward, how long it takes for a PreMET to be attended to, and how many PreMETs end up escalating to a MET call.”

“PreMETs being called via Medtasker ensure the entire team is notified, not just one individual. They receive an automatic reminder at 7.5 minutes and 15 minutes. It’s been very successful for not only nursing staff and doctors, but has also benefited patients and the organisation.”

Since its rollout at Northern Hospital Epping, the PreMET on Medtasker process has become integral to clinical deterioration management and well accepted by staff.

“Understanding the number and nature of PreMETs, allowing workload and workforce to be adjusted as needed, is a first. As the system collects patient level data, we’ve been able to look into, not only trends, but specific cases of concern raised by the quality team,” said Lachie.

“We’ve used the Medtasker data to help improve patient safety in these incidents in a way we’ve never been able to before, which is great.”

“We’ll be presenting this at the Sydney Digital Health Summit in mid-October on our findings and recommendations.”

The rollout of PreMET on Medtasker was part of the original plan, but was deferred at Broadmeadows Hospital due to the pandemic. The Standard 6 Committee has confirmed the time has come for Broadmeadows Hospital to be included as intended.

“We’ve come a long way with Medtasker, but there are still some tweaks and projects in the works,” says Lachie.

“For instance, currently, only inpatients are visible on the system, but the plan is to pull in outpatient and community patients so that tasks can be directly associated with them, instead of using platforms not linked to iPM messaging option.”

“Although the EMR is coming soon, there is a need for reliable secure mobile communication now for all patients, regardless of whether they are within the ‘four walls’ of the hospital. We can already leverage Medtasker outside the hospital using our secure two-factor authentication and have trialed this successfully in Hospital in the Home.”

Click here to view a video on the Medtasker update.