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06 Mar

Posted at 12:29h in Blog

Hospital or clinic visits can inspire anxiety, fear, or dread in many people. A clinical environment can provide an unsettling atmosphere as many do not have extensive knowledge or experience with medical situations. In fact, many people suffer from white-coat syndrome wherein individuals experience a temporary rise in blood pressure in clinical settings. Often, patients and family caregivers are overwhelmed by the stress of the situation, which can make understanding and processing massive amounts of complex medical information extremely difficult. Thus, clear communication between the clinical team, patient, and family caregivers is at the core of the ideal patient experience and outcome.  It is critical that medical communication is family-centered. Family members of patients often wish for up-to date information and details regarding their potential roles in care plans during and after hospital visits.1,2 To avoid misunderstandings concerning treatment, follow-up instructions or the severity of a patient's condition, clinical teams must prioritize effective communication strategies that educate the entire family.3 Counseling patients and families on current care and postcare plans cultivates open communication and transparency, which can be fundamental to a full recovery.4  Involving family members also allows the counseling to be more reflective of a patient’s current life situation. This...

06 Feb

Posted at 15:07h in Blog

Treating patients virtually is an increasingly effective and cost-saving trend in the healthcare world. In particular, remote patient monitoring (RPM) is transforming preventive healthcare and certain outpatient services. RPM uses digital technologies to monitor and collect medical data from patients outside of a hospital setting.1 This data is relayed to healthcare providers who will assess and implement further action if needed. Multiple devices are often used with RPM systems, such as blood glucose and blood pressure monitors, pulse oximeters, and other specialized tools for recording health data.  During the COVID-19 pandemic, significant updates on how providers and institutions can be reimbursed for RPM services were enacted. As a result, more institutions can now utilize remote care options.2 By using RPM, patients and providers reduce their disease exposure risks by limiting direct contact. RPM services also ensures a reliable method of contact when travel is restricted, such as what was seen during lockdown periods. Further, an advantage is gained by using RPM, because the patient is continuously monitored as compared to the traditional method of office visits, where health data are only spot-checked. As a result of the success of RPM programs during the pandemic, coverage of RPM through the Centers for...

13 Dec

Posted at 11:36h in Blog

The pandemic served as a catalyst for change and innovation in the digital health world and at-home care. The combination of telehealth and hospital-at-home (HaH) services will have lasting positive effects but requires comprehensive and proactive remote technology to provide quality care to patients. With the advancement of technology, more hospitals and physician teams are adopting the HaH model. However, many may ask if it is safe and effective. Thus, we seek to review the latest research on the impact of this healthcare model on patients and policy.  What does acute health care at home look like?  The HaH model can take a variety of forms. It has been primarily used for older patients who meet specific clinical and nonclinical eligibility criteria.1 These patients typically are at low risk of requiring complex technical procedures in a hospital setting but require continuous care and/or monitoring for certain conditions, including pneumonia, congestive heart failure, emphysema, pulmonary embolism, and other treatable conditions.1  Effective HaH models include face-to-face clinical care from nurses and physicians, diagnostic testing, continuous monitoring, and specific treatments, such as administering intravenous medication. The care plan for home-based patients typically includes visits by care providers and is driven by telehealth technologies. Digital platforms allow...

29 Nov

Posted at 10:28h in Blog

The effects of treatment and recovery in a hospital setting can seem like a cruel paradox. Admission to the hospital is often necessary for certain treatments; however, hospital stays can come with additional risks. It has long been known that hospitalization is associated with adverse outcomes, hospital-acquired infection, and mortality risk.1 Thus, many patients would prefer to receive treatment and recover in the comfort and safety of their own homes. As a response to these risks, hospital-at-home (HaH) programs have been created to allow for necessary treatments for acute conditions to be done in patient homes. Such a model demonstrates a patient-centered approach to care and has been increasingly adopted in multiple fields of medicine. In fact, implementing at-home hospital services is one of the most extensively-researched reforms in health care, demonstrating safer, cheaper, and more effective care options for some acute conditions.2 The concept of HaH dates back to the 1970s when clinical trials in the United Kingdom determined that there were no specific benefits of hospitalization over home-based care for patients experiencing myocardial infarctions.3 Hospital-at-home programs have since been implemented in several countries, including the United Kingdom, Canada, Israel, and Australia.4 The United States has previously been slow to adopt...

12 Oct

Posted at 09:27h in Blog

Today, Rapid Response Teams (RRTs) are a crucial component of many hospitals.  Implementing a RRT was one of the six strategies that defined the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI) 100,000 Lives campaign.  Most RRTs consist of critical care nurses, but they can also include respiratory therapists, pharmacists, and physicians. Research consistently shows that patients exhibit signs and symptoms of deterioration for several hours prior to a code.  These symptoms include changes in vital signs, mental status, and lab markers. The goal of a RRT is to intervene upstream from a potential code.  They reach the patient before deterioration turns into crisis.  This is different than a code blue team that typically responds to a patient that has already decompensated to cardiac arrest. Historically, most hospitals relied on busy bedside nurses to identify crashing patients and call for rapid response.  With most states having no limits on the number of patients assigned per nurse, many medical-surgical ward nurses are caring for 6 or more patients per shift.  Placing this additional responsibility on their already over-flowing plate is challenging at best.  Providing a RRT empowers bedside nurses to trigger an escalation of care earlier and faster.  Measurable Improvement in Patient Outcomes Hospitals using RRTs typically observe...

08 Aug

Posted at 15:20h in Blog

In medicine, every second counts. A patient can be stable one minute and crash during the next moment. Early detection, timeliness, and competency of clinical response are a triad of determinants that impact clinical outcomes of people with acute illness. Results from observational studies confirm that patients often show signs of clinical deterioration during the 24 hours before a severe event requiring clinical intervention.1  Timely detection of those subtle clinical warning signs has its own set of challenges. When those clinical values (especially vital signs) cross a critical threshold, they usually alert the bedside staff via beeping monitors. Because of the volume of alerts and the mountain of tasks that bedside staff manage, many alarms are simply silenced in seemingly stable patients. Thus, a critical value is often lost and not documented in the EMR system. Documentation of an alert is another task that can be triaged and forgotten. In some cases, especially in non-critical care settings, critical (outlier/severe) values may not trigger an alert, or the vital signs may not be taken as frequently.  Automated capture of vital signs and real-time alerts could reduce the burden on bedside staff while increasing data capture. However, the intense amount and frequency of data...

22 Jul

Posted at 16:27h in Blog

You may have heard of the term failure to rescue or the abbreviation FTR when discussing patient outcomes. Traditionally, FTR is defined as unexpected deterioration of a patient or death due to a complication. The complication could be due to an underlying illness or related to medical care. Both hospitals and physicians recognize FTR as an urgent problem with numerous and multifaceted contributing factors. A patient’s poor outcome due to FTR could be related to any of the following challenges:  Inadequate or inconsistent method of collecting vital signs data  Failure to recognize and respond rapidly to abnormal vital signs Delays in timely escalation of care for patients showing signs of clinical deterioration  Many hospitals manually collect vital signs, where data is entered by a health care professional into the patient's electronic health record (EHR) every 4 to 12 hours. This approach represents single data points in time but does not reflect what happens during time intervals between data captures. During these undocumented intervals, patients may rapidly or subtly deteriorate. By the time clinicians become aware of this decline, the complication may be full blown and lead to an FTR episode. How can a health care organization reduce the number of FTR cases? 1. Automate the Capture...

18 Jul

Posted at 10:24h in Blog

While preventing all medication complications is impossible, health care providers strive to identify the risks of complications for their patients.  Complications can increase a patient’s length of stay, consume limited staff resources, increase the need for higher levels of care, and even lead to the patient's death. When a patient unexpectedly deteriorates from a complication, the poor outcome is often referred to as a failure to rescue or FTR case. The term can be used as a diagnosis or as a safety and quality measure. Hospital records use a coding system that can identify the diagnosis for a patient, and FTR has such a code. Since 2003, many healthcare organizations review their records to identify the underlying causes of their FTR cases to improve patient care and outcomes. In 2010, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services began to monitor FTR rates using an algorithm called Patient Safety Indicators 04 (PSI 04). With the advancement of the electronic medical record, data collection and analysis in the field of FTR has exploded. A few of the key studies and findings are highlighted below: Approximately 10% of general ward patients experience unexpected decompensation, with half transferred to an intensive care unit (ICU).1 Over 85% of cardiac...

31 May

Posted at 11:14h in Blog

Critical Care Medicine is the medical specialty of caring for patients with immediate life-threatening conditions. These types of patients need frequent assessment and have a greater need for technological support than other patients admitted to the hospital. Hence, the specialty involves the assessment and management of these critical patients in specialized units of the hospital. As with most of the medical specialties, critical care medicine has humble origins with the development of “Iron Lung” technology during the polio epidemic in the 1950s. In the earlier days of the specialty, any physician could render Critical Care. As this area of medicine became more sophisticated - involving advanced technologies and clinical skills, specialized nursing units in the 1960s called Intensive Care Units (ICUs) were developed to care for the critically ill patients. On the training side, formalized pathways to certification, in the knowledge base and skills to care for these patients, were developed through the American Association of Critical Care Nurses. Eventually, the established medical specialties of Internal Medicine, Surgery, Anesthesiology, Emergency Medicine, and Neurology created a formal training curriculum and certification in the subspecialty of Critical Care Medicine.  ICUs and Critical Care Medicine, along with Emergency Medicine, have become the safety net of...

27 May

Posted at 10:05h in Blog

HOUSTON, TX, May 8, 2022 – DECISIO announced yesterday the issuance of US Patent 11,309,079 B2, which related to a system, method, and computer program product for providing a patient dashboard system in a hospital setting.  The patent covers a method of displaying information in a patient care setting using a near real-time monitoring dashboard. It further covers the collection and aggregation of clinical information from multiple sources to interpret and display actionable insight. Patent 11,309,079 B2, titled, ‘System And Method For A Patient Dashboard’, filters, analyzes, and displays patient data that is relevant to the treatment of the patient, including recommended medical actions and pertinent positives and negatives results. The company recently rebranded DECISIO and launched a new website. The flagship product, previously DECISIOInsight, is now named InsightIQTM. InsightIQ reduces clinical variation with digitized bundles of care that prioritizes clinicians’ attention to at-risk, deteriorating patients for early intervention.  EnvisionIQTM, a clinical analytics platform, was announced in early 2022 and paves the way for a whole suite of DECISIO IQ products to be announced in the near future.  “The changes we have made at DECISIO over the course of the past several months only strengthens the confidence we have in the huge potential...