Jessica Green speaks about how the heavily filtered air of modern hospitals creates a novel environment where microbes of human origin are free to flourish, while untreated outdoor air helps keep the amount of potential pathogens down.
Interesting discussion over here on Reddit, with people of varied (though unconfirmed) expertise weighing in on the issue.
That’s the claim being made by the team behind the newly announced Humber River Region Hospital.
Impressive project. The most impressive part, I’d say, is the automated delivery of supplies- this is the kind of intervention that will go a long way to reducing HAIs, and quite frankly I never expected to see such a system deployed quite so soon. I went into the video expecting any innovation to be strictly in the digital realm, and was very happy to see the implications of a digitally-enhanced workflow spilling out and affecting the spatial arena.
Other than that, though, the rest of hospital appears quite standard, with analog devices swapped out for digital one wherever possible. In other words, there’s no real investigation of how a digital devices might fundamentally change workflow; instead, the devices simply supercharge the existing model of care. That said, there’s not much more one can expect from a facility this size. Any paradigm shifts would have be proven in smaller facilities before being scaled up.
Also, I really hope they’ve through a infection control strategy for those fancy touchscreens.
This self-proclaimed “Star Trek-style” ward recently opened in Leicester, England. And while I’m interested in any facility that’s pushing the boundaries technologically, these folks are going about it in the wrong way.
Technology should be something that we use to make medical work simpler and safer. It should help give back patients control of the environment and autonomy. The capabilities of this facility are off the charts and the project should be commended for doing something out of the box- but it really highlights the absolute need for proper design in these spaces.
High-tech is not enough; rackmounting equipment is not design. If I was that patient, I would be terrified.
Spatial design in these facilities isn’t something that can “wait” until the unit is functional- it needs to be part of the project from the ground up.
I’d like to get a hold of these new guidelines and give them a close look. The article seems to suggest that they are less a CSA-like collection of minimum/maximum distances, and more of a collection of tactics to create pleasant spaces in which patients will (as shown by EBD) get well faster.
The difference between a medical space and healing space is huge, and I’ll be very happy if the difference has been codified by the guidelines, even if following them isn’t mandatory.
I’d love to see a graph of the increase of these injuries- which are musculoskeletal, by the way- matched against the adoption of computing devices in the care environment, as I’d be very willing to bet that there’s a clear relationship between the two.
This is what you get when technology demands are met by dropping computers into already-built spaces rather than integrating them ergonomically into the building plans at conceptual design. Hospitals are not houses or offices- a high level of integration must be present if we’re to expect the very high performance demands we put on these spaces.
From the article entitled “Institute of Medicine report says FDA not fit to regulate HIT”:
In its report, the IOM panel also recommended that another study be done to quantify health IT-related deaths, serious injuries or unsafe conditions so that the safety concerns can be properly addressed. “You can only improve what you measure,” says the report.
Hits the nail on the head, one paragraph from the end. Regulation of systems that can kill people is highly necessary, but until some definitions are put in place drawing a line between machine and human error, discussions like this are really just a whole lot of conjecture.
Though a variety of studies have concluded that the use of health IT may improve patient safety, mistakes made in the systems or difficulty using the technology can lead to serious injury or death, according to the report. An allergy might be omitted from a computer record, for example, or an incorrect medication dosage might be recorded.
How is this not a problem regardless of the medium used to record said information?
This is a step in the right direction. I’m blown away by the paranoia surrounding the digitization of medical records. Of course, there are massive privacy concerns related when you put health information online, but if you’re comfortable banking and filing taxes over the web, then there’s no reason you should be any less comfortable having health records online once equivalent security is put in place.
Can’t help but wonder if that’s because the interface for these system need some serious HCI-intensive makeovers. Any EHR system I’ve come across (any maybe I’m seeing the wrong ones) invariably looks like Excel running on Windows 95.
At least three to five days of EHR training was necessary to achieve the highest level of overall satisfaction.
If a system takes 5 days to learn, then it’s not a tool that helps you work. It is work. And it’s keeping staff from having more direct time with patients.
Withings is expanding their line of information-infused . Impressive little device. It only appears to work with iOS for now, but once the data is captured, it supports a solid number of health-monitoring platforms, and the graphing of data is impressive. This is just the kind of thing that can turn an EMR from a series of health snapshots to continuous stream of health data.
The graphs of data is very nicely done.
The usefulness of a device like this is a given for people with chronic conditions. However, as noted in the Singularity Hub writeup, even the most health-conscious people are unlikely to carry around this hardware unless such a condition forces them to do so.
The next step, of course, is to somehow build monitoring hardware into the phone itself. This might sound unlikely until you remember pulse detector apps have already been written, which use nothing but the device’s camera.