Self-help kiosk set up in hospital's emergency department

The Health Kiosk machine.

Patients at Thames Hospital's emergency department will be able to use a self-help kiosk to check-in and take their vitals such as blood pressure and monitor their heart rate before even stepping into a consulting room.

Thames Hospital will be the first in New Zealand to trial the patient kiosk which is aimed at cutting down waiting times for patients and freeing up medical and reception staff to treat patients faster and have more time for other work.

The kiosk is the brain child of the hospital's clinical director Dr Ruth Large who hoped the machine would ease up queues during the hospital's busy summer period when the population in the Coromandel tripled from Christmas through to the end of January.

Dr Large was a finalist in the New Zealand Clinicians Challenge last year which won her the chance of having her idea bought to life by Pauanui-based Health Kiosk. The company, which had already been developing a similar machine at a cost of about $200,000, also planned to roll it out to medical clinics and install a coin operated version using the same measurement components at pharmacies.

Thames Hospital's self-help touch screen kiosk has been tailored for emergency departments and collects key patient data as well as measuring the amount of oxygen in their blood, weight, height and heart rate.

The main idea behind the kiosk was to speed up wait times by between five and 10 minutes per patient who used the kiosk, but Dr Large also thought it would improve patient privacy as it would skip having to go through a receptionist and their information would instead be sent directly to a triage nurse to check.

"It's not going to save money, it's certainly not going to lose jobs, it I hope will just improve customer satisfaction - that's the main goal."

The kiosk, leased at $250 a month, will be installed in November and be trialled through to at least the end of January providing it is successful. Patients who opt to use the machine will also asked to fill out a questionnaire to help the hospital gauge public reaction.

If successful, the kiosk could be adapted to include health screening or help the patient carry out a self-assessment to help them decide whether they needed to by seen urgently or could wait until their GP was open.

The pilot is also being watched by other much busier hospital's emergency departments including Waikato Hospital to see if there was benefit in installing the kiosk.

Grey Power's age care committee chairman Roy Reid supported a move that would reduce wait times for patients, but said the technology needed to be supported by staff to help show patients how to use it and sufficient back-up was also needed it if the readings were not satisfactory. He welcomed it only being an option at this stage.

What the self-help kiosk does:

Collect key data like patients name, date of birth and gender
Screening questions including allergy to medication and whether they smoke or have diabetes
Measure blood pressure
Measure weight
Measure height
Measure blood oxygen saturation using infrared technology
Measure heart rate
Automatically calculates Body Mass Index (BMI)
*estimated to save between five and 10 minutes of hospital staff time