Due to rapid advancements in the integration of wireless technology and health care, the future of post-hospitalization patient care will soon be coming to a screen nearby: on BlackBerries, iPads and iPhones.
With the arrival of national health care reform and hospitals' ongoing efforts to implement cost-saving measures, developers of wireless health care systems are coming up with innovative ideas to fill evolutionary gaps.
In San Diego, three health-related firms, Sotera Wireless Inc., Skylight Healthcare Systems Inc. and CliniComp Intl. each developed wireless technologies aiming to help hospitals save money by reducing costly hospital readmission of patients and providing remote patient care.
Privately held Skylight Healthcare Systems' technology has already made its way into hundreds of private patient hospital rooms nationwide.
If Skylight's chief executive, David Schofield, has his way, patients discharged from hospitals will soon be able to follow-up on their medical care using their home computers, iPhones, BlackBerries and iPads.
The ACCESS Interactive Patient System is a computer technology that converts existing television sets in patient hospital rooms into an educational and communications platform. According to Schofield, the system is already in place in some 15,000 hospital rooms nationwide, including at Sharp Grossmont Hospital in La Mesa.
This is how it works.
"We install our independent fiber optics networks, servers, routers and satellite dishes in the hospital along with a PC in every patient room that basically converts the TV into a PC monitor," Schofield said. This, in turn, allows the hospital to feed tailored informational and educational content directly onto the TV screen in private patient rooms. By integrating ACCESS with the hospital network, Skylight also gains access to such sensitive patient data as the reason for a patient's hospital stay and a list of medications, which is used to customize the content each patient will see on the TV screen.
Schofield gave the example of a patient who is waiting for knee replacement surgery. "If we know that a patient is in the hospital for knee replacement surgery, we can send information to the TV screen prior to the surgery to tell the patient what to expect and how to prepare, and 12 hours after the surgery send a rehab video and information on medications," Schofield said.
Privacy Concerns Considered
When asked about privacy issues, Schofield said patients should not be concerned given that Skylight agreed contractually with the hospital to abide by Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act privacy rules. With a requirement to serve only single-patient rooms, there is only one TV screen per patient, he said.
ACCESS saves hospital caregivers time and helps cut costs, he added. Typically, nurses take 20 to 30 minutes to educate each patient on medical procedures using videos, and then need to document that the patient has viewed the content manually in their medical records. Access, by contrast, takes about 2 to 3 minutes to feed the information onto the TV screen and automatically records that the patient has viewed the information in the hospital's electronic medical records system, he noted. This frees up valuable caregiving time.
Hospitals pay a flat per bed per day fee to use the technology, and there are no upfront costs, Schofield said. He declined to give company revenue figures, but said, that in 2009 total revenues were up 70 percent from 2008.
This September, Schofield hopes to expand the system by monitoring patients post-hospitalization.
Linking Laptops to Networks
A new platform, dubbed iCarePassport, currently being tested in a pilot program at Hoag Memorial Hospital Presbyterian in Newport Beach, seeks to link patients to the hospital computer network via their laptops or home computers, allowing patients, for instance, to schedule follow-up appointments with their doctors. Schofield plans to test iCarePassport at two more hospitals, and then, launch it this September. If all goes as planned, patients will also be able to use their BlackBerries, iPhones and iPads to link to the hospital's Web site. "The goal of this platform is to reduce patient readmission rates to hospitals, which is costly to hospitals," Schofield said.
Concurrently, Schofield plans to roll out a second technology platform, dubbed iCareChat, which is currently being tested in a pilot program at Mercy Gilbert Medical Center in Arizona. iCareChat allows hospital patients to conduct videoconferencing with loved ones who can't visit. Schofield foresees that especially new moms will be excited to show off their new bundle of joy to relatives living elsewhere in the country and abroad, if only virtually, from the maternity ward. "Hospitals don't have that technology today and we see this as having a big impact to improve patient satisfaction," he said.