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Evaluation of Outcomes Using a Tablet-Based System to Support Glycemic Management Workflow Operations: A Retrospective Observational Study

  • Mobile & Wireless Health
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Abstract

The treatment of hospitalized patients with type 2 diabetes requires glycemic management to maintain the patients’ blood glucose levels within a normal range. We developed a blood glucose management system (BGM) system in 2015, which is a tablet-based workflow support system. This system enables medical staff to continually confirm the physicians’ instructions by measuring the blood glucose levels while using a tablet terminal.

In this study, we examined electronic medical records (EMRs) to evaluate the usage frequency of the BGM system and the time required for the glycemic management workflow in comparison to conventional PC terminals in a large hospital setting. The data includes 197,927 blood glucose level measurements that were taken in the general wards of Tottori University Hospital between January 2016 and June 2017. The usage frequency of the glycemic management workflow while using the BGM system was 145,864 times (approximately 74% of the total blood glucose measurements). The mean time until the completion of the glycemic management workflow in the case of hyperglycemia was 16 min 33 s, which is 26% shorter than using a PC terminal for treatment that involves injection or infusion (1454 times). The BGM system is proactively utilized by medical staff, thereby improving the operating efficiency. The results of this study indicate that the BGM system installed on tablet terminals can improve the efficiency in large-scale medical institutions that treat patients with diabetes.

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Data availability

The datasets generated during and/or analyzed during the current study are available from the corresponding author upon a reasonable request. This manuscript includes all the available data in this study.

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Acknowledgements

We wish to thank the participants of this study.

Editorial assistance

We thank Mr. Yuichiro Tomita and Ms. Erika Matsui for their technical assistance. We also wish to thank Editage (https://www.editage.jp/) for editing a draft of this manuscript.

Authorship.

All named authors meet the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) criteria for the authorship for this article, take responsibility for the integrity of the work as a whole, and have given their approval for this version to be published.

Authorship contributions

Kei Teramoto participated in the design of the study and wrote the initial draft of the manuscript. All of the other authors have contributed to the data collection and interpretation, and critically reviewed the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

Open access

This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.

Funding

“No funding or sponsorship was received for this study or publication of this article.” All authors had full access to all of the data in this study and take complete responsibility for the integrity of the data and the accuracy of the data analysis.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. The Division of Medical Informatics, Tottori University Hospital, Nishi-cho, Yonago, 36, Japan

    Kei Teramoto & Hiroshi Kondo

  2. Division of Cardiovascular Medicine, Endocrinology and Metabolism, Department of Molecular Medicine and Therapeutics, Tottori University Faculty of Medicine, Nishi-cho, Yonago, 36, Japan

    Tsuyoshi Okura

Authors
  1. Kei Teramoto
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  2. Tsuyoshi Okura
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  3. Hiroshi Kondo
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Kei Teramoto.

Ethics declarations

This study was conducted in accordance with the ethical standards of our institutional research committee and with the 1964 Declaration of Helsinki and its later amendments. Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants that were included in the study by the opt-out method.

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All of the authors have nothing to declare.

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Teramoto, K., Okura, T. & Kondo, H. Evaluation of Outcomes Using a Tablet-Based System to Support Glycemic Management Workflow Operations: A Retrospective Observational Study. J Med Syst 44, 167 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10916-020-01636-0

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