If high-tech beds could talk …

Healthcare Purchasing News, Sept, 2007 by Jeannie Akridge

Are your beds trying to tell you something? They're certainly getting smarter by the minute. Many of them know how much a patient weighs. Some of them can tell you when a patient moves or tries to get out of bed. They help automate processes for time-stressed nurses with patient safety and back-saving features available at the touch of a button. While they're doing all of that, a select few can generate valuable data that caregivers can use to make sound clinical decisions and drive true process change.

"There is so much information on that real estate under the patient," said Mitchell Smith, director of marketing for critical care and maternal care, Hill-Rom, Batesville, IN. "The bed of the future is really an extension of the caregiver's hands and increasingly their eyes and ears," Smith added.

Suddenly the bed is playing a much more active role in patient care at a time when it's needed most, and hospitals are reaping the financial rewards from these necessary capital investments. In a way it's like finding cash under the mattress.

"Here's the ominous situation," described Chad Rohrer, marketing manager for Stryker Medical (Kalamazoo, MI). "We have patients getting sicker, while hospitals have strained resources, and increased expectations to improve patient outcomes. We have less nurses and the government, insurance companies, other governing bodies, are expecting the hospitals to do more, and follow increasing numbers of best practices. As healthcare is becoming more demanding, how can we provide a product that is a tree tool to help healthcare providers keep up with all of these demands?"

Vendors are responding with high-tech beds that are intelligent, interactive, intuitive, and "connected".

Rohrer described the data integration capabilities available through Stryker's new InTouch bed. "The bed today, with a PDA-like intelligent touch screen provides more and better information displayed in an easier to use format," said Rohrer. "And the bed is being built and constructed in a way that it is going to be upgradeable for future applications."

InTouch features Stryker's iBed Awareness option which Rohrer described as a tool to help nurses organize their day through "protocol reminders that will help them stay compliant with clinically proven, evidence-based practices." Caregivers select what they deem as "safe" parameters for an individual patient. The bed then remembers the setting and will "alert caregivers when the bed deviates from that protocol." The bed can also be set to remind caregivers to perform a specific task. such as turning a patient, he said.

An Event Manager feature on the bed displays event-specific information on the touch screen so nurses don't have to remember what to do next. Helpful features such as unit conversion tables, calculators and foreign language translation keys are also available through the easy-to-use touch screen featured on InTouch. "All of what this bed can do is operated essentially by seven buttons on the touch screen," said Rohrer. "You can have a lot of information but that information is not useful unless it's intuitive," he added.

Hill-Rom's NaviCare Patient Safety software module builds a workflow around the company's successful data-centric smart beds to help improve patient safety and optimize care.

Adam McMullin, vice president, marketing and strategy for Hill-Rom's IT Solutions group explained: "The NaviCare Patient Safety Application sits centrally, and centrally allows you to configure the bed in the appropriate way for the condition of that patient." Central administration not only saves nurses' time it also means protocols are administered more consistently, and nurses stay connected to the bedside from wherever they are.

"When a condition that you want the caregiver to know about occurs, you automatically route an intelligent alert directly to the caregiver," said McMullin. "You've really provided a connection between the patient and the bed and the caregiver that's real time and it's intelligent to know something about that patient around which conditions are important to notify the caregiver so they can make a decision on what to do."

"The bed of the future is really part of the system," Smith emphasized. "It's just another interoperable medical device, capable of sharing information with any other piece of equipment, or electronic medical record (EMR) or nurse communication system," said Smith.

Jack Barr, manager of operational marketing, patient support systems, Hill-Rom, described the company's integrated approach to patient care. "A bed is not just a bed anymore. It's a vital part of the technology that goes with the people and the processes that help deliver the outcomes that a customer is trying to deliver to a patient."

Safe is smart

Contemporary bed technology is centered around features that help caregivers to comply with protocols and best practices being publicized by organizations such as the Joint Commission and the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI).