Hospital room of future at Mackenzie Richmond Hill now
Smart beds, staff badges and pillow speakers

YorkRegion.com
July 15, 2014
By Kim Zarzour

If there is any place you’d expect to be smart, it would be your local hospital.

Mackenzie Health is creating an entire hospital unit with a focus on “smart”.

From smart sensors that take note of which caregivers follow good hand hygiene, to smart beds that weigh patients and keep them from falling, the new Innovation Unit is a living, breathing laboratory - and a glimpse into the hospital of the future.

The Innovation Unit was launched at Mackenzie Richmond Hill Hospital recently with a partnership between the hospital, medical technology company Hill-Rom Canada, and the Ivey School of Business.

Mackenzie Health purchased 180 smart beds at a cost of $7,000 to $10,000 each, including four bariatric beds equipped for larger and heavier patients (costing $30,000) and installed 34 on the fourth floor general medicine unit along with the latest in healthcare technology.

The idea was to transform the unit into what Tiziana Rivera, chief nursing executive and chief practice officer, calls a “sandbox” for testing hospital-care innovations, a first-in-Canada project featuring unique integration of advanced technology.

The key to this smart system, literally and figuratively, is the high-tech badge worn by all clinicians in the unit - physiotherapists, social workers, dieticians, physicians, pharmacists and housekeeping.

The badges interact with the new technology to send alerts, reminders and data for analysis, all with the goal of streamlining and improving patient care.

You may not notice the difference as a patient - except, maybe, a slightly quieter hospital stay without the usual intercom interruptions - but chances are your recovery will be smoother without a hospital-acquired fracture or infection, thanks to changes being introduced here.

The smart beds are able to communicate information directly to the clinical staff caring for patients, preventing falls by ensuring side rails are set up before staff leave the room, for example, and weighing patients so they don’t have to leave bed to use a shared weigh scale.

Hand-washing stations review staff hygiene practices and sensors provide hand-wash reminders.

The badges allow staff to communicate with each other, identify their location on the unit, alert them of patient calls and record patient call response times.

Colour-coded dome lights outside each room alert staff when patients need assistance. When a patient who is at risk of falling moves out of bed, the lights flash an alarm.

A “pillow speaker” allows direct communication between patients and their caregivers to indicate a need for bathroom assistance or pain management.

Patients can call directly to their primary caregiver, and if that person is busy, the system automatically redirects the call to the secondary caregiver, said Sabina Sabo, RN, professional practice leader for nursing and project manager.

It all means clinicians can respond faster to patient needs, Sabo said.

The hand hygiene sensor has already shown benefit, Rivera said.

Currently, hand hygiene audits are done manually across the hospital. With this first-in-Canada automated solution for hand hygiene, Mackenzie Health can now verify, with a sensor on the hand sanitizer gel dispenser, when the team member has washed his or her hands.

Since the project began, caregivers have been reminding each other to handwash and there has been a jump in compliance, Rivera said.

The data showed handwashing was lower among one group of clinicians. Follow-up discussions revealed this was because the caregivers were helping patients walk into the room; stopping to remove gloves and washing hands would put the patient at risk of falling. Together they worked out a solution, Rivera said.

A computer-screen “dashboard” allows the unit manager to have a bird’s-eye view, seeing which patients have called for help, where nurses are, which patients have bed rails up and brakes on, which position the bed is in (important to avoid bedsores or hospital-acquired pneumonia), and which rooms are identified as “isolation” requiring soap-and-water handwashing (not just gel), essential in preventing C-difficile outbreaks.

Rivera said the hospital is in the process of enhancing the unit’s wireless infrastructure so that at some point, all clinicians will have handheld devices like smart phones that will be linked to the technology and provide immediate access to information such as test results and discharge instructions.

At first the Big Brother-like oversight had some staff members concerned, wondering if they’d be monitored when in the washroom or on breaks, she said.

But as it has evolved, caregivers have provided input on how the information would be used, ensuring data collection is not for disciplinary purposes, but rather for quality improvement.

The International Centre for Health Innovation at the Ivey Business School is collecting and analyzing data. Rivera hopes the results will help highlight what is working, where there are gaps, and how best to design the hospitals of the future - here in Richmond Hill and the planned new hospital in Vaughan, as well as health care system in general.