GE just began trials of its “Smart Patient Room health-monitoring project” at New York’s Bassett Medical Center to keep hospitals sanitary and to eliminate medical errors.
GE Smart Patient Room health monitoring project
Part of GE’s Healthymagination initiative, the Smart Patient Room can determine whether soap and sanitizer dispensers are used by medical personnel before and after seeing a patient. In fact, an ICU nurse should wash his or her hands 200 times a shift in order to follow proper infection control practices – which means washing before touching a patient and washing after touching a patient. The proper method requires a nurse to smear the alcohol rub around for 1 minute during each washing. That’s more than 3 hours of hand-washing a shift! Would this be bad for the skin of the nurse?
According to Scott Gallagher, a senior consultant for GE Healthcare, RFID sensors are installed in dispensers for soap or alcohol-based hand sanitizers to determine when medical personnel are using them and following hygiene protocol. In addition to hand hygiene compliance, the technology tracks when patients get in and out of bed to help prevent falls. The GE Smart Patient Room also monitors clinical roundups to ensure that clinicians check in on patients at least once per hour. The technology consists of optical sensors, RFID tags, facial recognition, computer vision algorithms, cameras and speakers installed in existing hospital rooms to monitor patient safety and reduce medical errors, according to GE. Medical errors are a leading cause of death in the United States, organizations such as the Institute of Medicine and Millennium Research Group have reported.
According to Gallagher, an AI engine sits on top of the RFID signals. “Through computer vision algorithms, we can detect people and track them as they go through the room,” he said. The monitoring system then issues an alert when it detects a risk, such as patient movement or facial expressions indicating a possible stroke. A doctor or nurse can then check on the patient to either make sure the patient is safe or start treatment.
“Our goal here is to use this approach to sense the motion, action of individuals, and then determine whether they’re within a given policy and work toward better outcomes,” Peter Tu, research scientist for GE’s Global Research Center, told eWEEK.
Likening the Smart Patient Room platform to an iPhone running an abundance of applications, Tu expects hospitals to use the technology to detect patient delirium, particularly as a result of a medication reaction; check for ulcers; and watch for signs of pain or stroke based on facial expressions.
Tu noted that the wires are connected to sensors behind the walls and that PCs would transmit motion and action rather than actual video to protect patients’ privacy. “We ensure privacy of individuals,” he said.
Gallagher added that the sensors and monitoring would not be visible to patients. “What’s important is that the technology is transparent to the patient and to the care provider,” he explained. “It’s the data that comes from the sensor technology that creates the value for the hospital.”
The technology was developed at GE’s Global Research Center in Niskayuna, N.Y., and will be tested at the Bassett Medical Center inpatient teaching facility. The pilot project marks GE’s first implementation of the Smart Patient Room in a clinical environment, according to Gallagher.
“[Caregivers] get into such a routine that it’s, ‘This is what I do,’ and they don’t realize that they haven’t” washed their hands properly before treating patients, GE Healthcare CTO Mike Harsh said, reports the Reuters news service. “We’re able to analyze that in real time and say, ‘Hey, remember to do this.’”
On a related note, the year-old Joint Commission Center for Transforming Healthcare recently introduced a web-based tool to help hospitals track and analyze quality and safety programs, starting with hand hygiene. (Health Data Management reports that future uses will include communications at patient hand-offs, wrong-site surgery and surgical-site infections.)
