Why Lumeo? Caring for People at the Right Place and Time

Bringing a new Regional Health Information System (RHIS) to hospital organizations in the Southeastern region will do a lot of things, like give patients better access to their own health information, and speed up the time it takes for healthcare workers to find the information they’re looking for.

But some might not know the multitude of other benefits that Lumeo will bring to the region.

James Russell, Director of Clinical Operations and Diagnostics at Quinte Health, spoke to the Lumeo Project Team about how Lumeo’s new Capacity Management system, commonly referred to as CAPMAN, will revolutionize patient transfers, whether within one organization or between all partner organizations in the region.

CAPMAN will give people like James a “bird’s eye view” across all six organizations to see where there is capacity for admissions and where there is a need to focus resources to help with flow inside and between organizations.

James noted that in 2023 alone, Quinte Health managed over 12,000 admissions across its four hospitals.

Once Lumeo is in place, the thousands of admissions at each organization will run through the CAPMAN system, shaving off time spent previously manually admitting people. In fact, for every minute CAPMAN saves per admission (based on 12,000 admissions), 200 hours of downstream time will be saved for the team managing the admissions.

 James and his team recently got to test the CAPMAN system.

“We got a chance to move patients between beds. We got to see how the system indicated that a bed was now dirty and needed to be cleaned, and how these different triggers would interact with the different teams that needed to process within it,” he explained.

At Quinte Health, and within most other organizations, this planning is done on paper and on whiteboards. And if a transfer needs to be made between organizations, for example from Kingston Health Sciences Centre to Quinte Health or vice versa, that planning is also done the old-fashioned way.

“Currently, we manage this through phone calls, text messages, back and forth with our different community partners and our regional partners,” James said.

Although the CAPMAN system won’t necessarily replace text messages and phone calls between the organizations to facilitate transfers, it will drastically improve information sharing between each site.

“We’ll have one patient record to look at, and won’t rely on faxing, verbal or handwritten notes to communicate the patient’s care needs or treatment information between the partner organizations.”

Considering there are hundreds of interfacility transfers done between each hospital organization per month, CAPMAN will save time and brainpower for those facilitating these transfers by creating a clear picture of where there is space, transforming each organization’s plans into one working system.

“If we get calls over the weekend from one of our partner hospitals, ‘Hey, we need some help. Can you move some people that we’re looking to move back to Belleville?’…We’ll be able to see when they’re in dire straits or when they need to help us out, and vice versa” he said. “We’re all in this together, and it’s our duty to support each other with the utmost transparency, that way, the patient always wins. CAPMAN puts this knowledge in front of our noses, in real time.”

In the end, this won’t just help the flow for those working in hospital organizations, but also change the lives of those seeking care.

“So many times, within our system today, people have to wait. We’ve got waiting rooms in the emergency room, we’ve got waiting rooms in our outpatient locations, we’ve even got virtual ones,” James explained.

With CAPMAN, clinical operations teams will be able to move people through their individual systems dramatically faster because staff will be able to see in an instant when a bed or room needs to be cleaned, or when a bed opens up at another hospital in the region.

“If this was our family member, if this was our brother, sister, mother, aunt, we would want that person to be cared for quickly and in the right place,” James said.

This is what the Lumeo CAPMAN system is striving for. To help healthcare workers move people to the right place of care with much less time and effort.

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