Keep working on bed-tracking solution

With only 29 facilities providing inpatient psychiatric services and only 31 counties having practicing psychiatrists, it is imperative Iowans in need of such services have a clear and timely path forward, no matter where they reside.

Too often Iowans in mental health crisis have arrived at hospital emergency rooms or have been taken into police custody, only to wait for hours as facilities throughout the state are phoned frantically in search of available inpatient beds.

A newly established bed-tracking software system was intended to ease this burden. It has been given high marks by the Iowa Department of Human Services, which agreed to spend up to $270,000 on a Florida-based contractor for its development. But a Gazette investigation showed praise in Des Moines is not mirrored by staff at the rural and regional hospitals using the service.

Information is not placed into the system in a timely fashion, critics say. When distant hospitals locate available beds in the database, a follow-up call to reserve the space often is met with disappointment. The bed already was filled. The end result is expensive, new software that many area hospitals bluntly say is 'not useful.”

It's a double-edged sword for mental health advocates who not only depended on the database to speed patient care, but who also hoped it would provide real-time statistics showing whether Iowa's existing 700 inpatient psychiatric beds are adequately meeting needs.

We still believe such goals are possible, but DHS needs to further integrate the bed-tracking database.

The system now requires a person to manually update information about available beds. That's a significant flaw because patient care always must be hospital staff's top priority. It's unreasonable to expect health care professionals to open and update a separate piece of software when they are, for instance, needed to assist a patient in their care.

The situation also underscores the problem that the database was intended to address: Inpatient psychiatric beds are at a premium in Iowa. Sometimes a bed is vacant for mere hours before it is filled. Any system that doesn't display real-time data always will be inadequate to the task.

Bed-tracking is a worthy idea. But it must be real-time, incorporated into existing hospital protocols and workflow. Only then will Iowans, in crisis and otherwise, know whether supply is meeting demand.

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