Patient Experience
Comer Patients are Entertained, Informed with New TV System
To advance patient engagement, education and safety, Comer Children's Hospital at the University of Chicago began using an innovative pediatric interactive patient care system last August. The system, called GetWell Town, uses the bedside TV to entertain, educate and empower Comer patients and their caregivers.
The system complements Comer's child-focused environment and helps children ease into their hospital stay with high-quality entertainment features including password-protected, parent-controlled access to the Internet, Pandora, Hollywood movies, games and more. It also offers more than 170 videos featuring information about specific conditions and medical procedures — all in child-friendly language.
"GetWell Town is the perfect bedside solution to complement our vision of children and family-centered care," said Jeffrey Finesilver, MBA, vice president of the University of Chicago Medical Center and director of Comer Children's Hospital. "We are very excited to provide our families and young patients with a new interactive approach to learning about their health and a way to access the hospital's resources from the bedside."
One of the first initiatives at Comer has been to provide patients and families with direct access to services such as housekeeping, patient relations and hospital chaplains to name a few. Rather than calling their nurse to make service requests, patients can use their beside remote control and keyboard to communicate their needs via the GetWell Town system. This streamlines service requests, expedites the response, frees nurses for care tasks, and empowers young patients to feel independent and make their own choices.
The network also will be integrated with the hospital's EpicCare Inpatient Clinical System to enable bi-directional flow of patient information. Nurses will be able to order educational content specific to a child's diagnosis, keep track of their progress and have it automatically documented into the patient's record. This will help save nursing hours, meet regulatory requirements and reduce the potential for human errors.
Terry Park, RN, BSN, CPON, a patient care manager on Comer 6, said the system allows him and his staff to address any patient satisfaction issues more promptly. "Using the system, patients and family members are able to make comments about their experience in real time, which enables us to respond immediately if there are concerns," Park said. "The service recovery we are able to perform is very valuable."
