Otimização da plataforma ViGIE de monitorização contínua e wireless de parâmetros como temperatura, humidade, pressão e gases no Hospital de Santo António

Abstract

Quality is one of the most important concepts in any organization. In the hospital context, quality has increasingly become a priority, a demand and an essential requirement in the management of healthcare organizations. Nowadays, for hospitals to guarantee a high level of competitiveness, they need to be concerned with quality issues, aiming to achieve an innovative organizational environment, implementing continuous improvement actions in order to reduce losses associated with the process and accomplish an effective and efficient hospital management system. The need to keep all temperature-, humidity- and pressure-sensitive products under control, from the manufacturer to the end-user, is a major global challenge. Following that, the need also arises to ensure the correct environmental conditions in the critical areas of a hospital, which lead to a reduction in the infection rate, and guarantee the preservation of products that need to be kept safely in the correct environment to maintain their effectiveness and use. That said, in 2011 the Centro Hospitalar Universitário de Santo António began a partnership with the company ViGIE, which has a continuous monitoring and alarm system used in several hospitals. It provides accurate real-time information, reports and ensures that the entire cold chain process is monitored and environmental conditions. ViGIE integrates seamlessly into quality control procedures, providing clear information for clinical audits and compliance with regulatory guidelines. The entire monitoring process takes place in ViGIE's software, which was configured at the same time of its implementation. This software became outdated over time, prompting a need to optimize the ViGIE platform. This optimization broadly covered the various sectors of Hospital Santo António that have monitoring sensors. By surveying a set of data extracted from the platform, the probes that had been deactivated were re-established, the configured alarm limits were optimized, probe calibrations were managed, and the sensors of all sectors were mapped on the platform. All of this was accomplished through training sessions with each service, enabling healthcare professionals to deepen their knowledge of how to use the platform, and consequently allowed them to jointly analyze the current needs for later updating the platform. It was noticed that with the training sessions and the optimization of the platform, the benefits of the ViGIE product in the organization have increased exponentially, ensuring greater efficiency of the ViGIE solution and increased safety for patients and hospital teams.

Date of Award	22 Mar 2024
Original language	Portuguese
Awarding Institution	Universidade Católica Portuguesa
Supervisor	Sílvia Maria de Jesus Moutinho Riedstra (Supervisor) & Joana Maria Morgado da Costa (Co-Supervisor)