Background
In the case of Kaiser Permanente's South Sacramento Medical Center, a serious problem triggered the first handheld solution. Workers Compensation costs were reaching unprecedented levels within the organization, largely due to injuries suffered during the manual lifting and transferring of patients by nursing staff.

"The investment in development and hardware achieved payback in only four weeks."

To solve the problem, the EH&S (Environmental Health & Safety) office assembled an injury prevention task force to find new ways to reduce patient handling injuries. By May 2001, a two-person patient handling team was hired to perform the handling and transfers of patients for the nursing units Monday through Friday, between 6 a.m. and 4 p.m. The team made frequent rounds and coordinated with staff to perform scheduled lifts, as well as to respond to pages throughout the hospital calling them to handle patients exceeding a certain weight, or who were fatigued, comatose, quadriplegic, or paraplegic. They also responded to any emergency situations involving combative or resistant patients.

Mountains of paperwork
In order for the injury prevention task force to oversee the success of the handling team program, the patient handlers recorded each patient handling intervention on a handwritten log. This daily log was designed to track such facts as the time the team was paged, the time it responded to the page, the patient's location, the type of lift, the equipment utilized, and any special circumstances.

"With the team averaging 40 lifts per day, writing the details of each incident slowed the team's ability to respond to requests," explained Mr. Steven Gerigk, EH&S manager at Kaiser Permanente South Sacramento Medical Center.