Introduction
The Shin Kong Wu Ho-Su Memorial Hospital in Taipei has been open since 1992. The hospital has over 900 beds, with thirty-five specialized departments including internal medicine, surgery, medical imaging, health management, obstetrics and gynecology, and pediatrics. The hospital serves both as a care center for patients and a training hospital for medical staff, taking seriously the importance of medical excellence, research, and the highest levels of patient care. The hospital had a project to begin looking for mobile devices to assist with administrative tasks and care giving. They looked first to PDAs, but found them too small and limited in their ability to integrate with other hospital systems. Larger, standard size workstations were another option, but they weretoo heavy for efficient mobile use. The hospital required a lightweight, full-featured device, easy to integrate with existing systems, easy to clean, quiet and durable. Shin Kong Hospital planned to use the technology to facilitate the rounds of the head nurses who routinely move from floor to floor, and station to station.

Solution
Shin Kong had already successfully implemented Advantech Point-of-Care terminals on each floor of the hospital as part of a comprehensive Nursing Information System. To meet their new requirements, the hospital selected the Advantech MICA-101, a 10.4” fanless, mobile clinical assistant, based on Intel® MCA architecture, and powered by an Intel® Atom™ processor. MICA-101 is lightweight; at 1.5 kg it can easily be carried by nurses in lieu of clumsy binders and clipboards. Head nurses can carry MICA-101 on their rounds to monitor each nursing station for adherence to hospital SOPs.They can audit and record data on the spot, something they previously had to write down, and then key in at a central workstation. The screen size is much larger than that of the PDAs the hospital tried in the past, and the standard architecture makes MICA-101 fully capable of running all the hospital’s medical applications without modification. The camera allows instant capture of areas in the hospital needing attention, such as deficiencies at a nursing station or procedures being incorrectly done. The pictures can later be used for training or guidance. The wireless connectivity ensures real-time access to data—a necessity for keeping track of head counts and patient movements throughout the facility. MICA-101 can be cleaned with medical grade solvents, minimizing risk of infection, and the fanless processor ensures it operates quietly near bedside. The head nurses use MICA-101 to process their daily diaries, and since implementation making the rounds has gone from 2.5hours to 50 minutes—leaving the nurses more time to take care of patients.

Shin Kong Hospital is considering expanding the MICA-101 coverage to its Emergency Room, with applications that assist doctors with trauma cases, monitor anesthesia levels, or provide positive identification of staff and patients using the onboard barcode reader.

Benefits
MICA-101 provides the following benefits to Shin Kong Hospital:
 n Wireless mobility, easy to carry on rounds and updated in real-time
 n Onboard camera 
 n Large screen size
 n Fully integrates with the hospital’s Nursing Information System and
           runs standard applications
 n Reduces the amount of time for head nurses to make the rounds
 n Paperless system used to audit and check headcounts
 n Increased efficiency