Improving Communication at Dell Children’s Medical Center

Dell Children’s Medical Center is growing. Our new bed tower is under construction and set to open in May 2013.  It will house three 24-bed patient units including an inpatient physical rehabilitation unit, the first in central TX.  During the design and planning for the new bed tower, we realized that the patients and families in the far south tower would benefit from an additional family resource center including several desktop computer workstations on which they can have email and internet access.  However, the new family resource area will not be staffed – so access to the medical librarians and DVDs and books to borrow will require a trip to the main Family Resource Center near the front entrance of the hospital.  We would like to explore development of an interface or app that would allow patients, families and visitors to connect with the main family resource center and medical library from anywhere in the hospital from desktops or laptops and potentially from ipads and smartphones as well – as long as the user is connected to the the Seton family wireless access network.  This would allow families to request assistance from the medical librarians as well as to check if DVDs and books were available.