Authors (including presenting author) :
Chan CS(1), Koo HW(2)
Affiliation :
(1) Dietetic Department, Tin Shui Wai Hospital, (2) Dietetic Department, Tuen Mum Hospital
Introduction :
In the global trend of building smart hospitals, current clinical practices should be reviewed against new technology in order to find a smarter way for service delivery. The growing utilisation of mobile device provides an opportunity for dietitians to rethink the delivery of nutrition care process. The nutrition care process involves nutrition assessment, diagnosis, intervention and monitoring. Dietitians are required to retrieve and integrate nutrition information in order to formulate an intervention to match patients’ nutritional needs. This involves data retrievals from different nutrition sources and tedious calculation. Different methods such as lists of products, handbooks have been used to facilitate the process. However, no locally-made mobile device app is available for this purpose.
Objectives :
Incorporate a locally-made dietetic app for mobile devices to speed up nutrition care process.
Methodology :
FileMaker was used to develop the app. FileMaker was chosen because it has no ongoing maintenance cost. The app stored nutrition information of over 1,000 commonly-prescribed local food items, hospital meal items, enteral and parenteral nutrition products. The data base was updated regularly. Dietitians could retrieve nutrition information in seconds for individual items or manipulate the database to devise specific meal plans or feeding regimens.
Result & Outcome :
Dietitians no longer had to retrieve information from different nutrition sources nor perform tedious calculations. Dietitians could finish the nutrition information retrieval and nutrient calculations by only a few touches on their mobile devices. Dependent on the complexity of patients’ nutritional needs, the estimated time shortened for the nutrition care process was around 30 seconds to 3 minutes per patient. In addition, usage of paper and errors in calculation were reduced.
