From the May 2018 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine
By Avner Halperin
With so many technology advancements, why are health facilities still relying on manual spot checks?
As we steadily pave our way through the 21st century, it’s incredible to see the positive impact that technology has had on health and medicine. From the introduction of cutting-edge tools like the da Vinci Surgical robot, to new screening and treatment technologies, as well as health applications for a wide range of conditions, advances once reserved for science fiction are now becoming our reality. And yet, despite all this technological advancement, when it comes to patient monitoring¬¬ – a basic but critical factor of health care – new monitoring technologies are not as widely adopted as they could be in hospitals and post-acute care facilities, opening up a huge opportunity for care improvement.
Today, an estimated 75 percent of hospital patients and more than 90 percent of post-acute care patients are manually monitored by health care professionals across the U.S. This means that well into the 21st century, general care patients only have their vital signs and other measurements checked once every 4-6 hours. It’s ironic, and sad, that today, doctors have less real-time data on their patients than healthy runners training for a marathon have on themselves, with the help of smartphones and wearables.
By not equipping our doctors and nurses with real-time patient data, and relying solely on manual monitoring methods, we are essentially blindfolding our clinicians. The reality is that in today’s fast-paced and highly competitive health care industry, with sporadic, spot-check data, patient care is not being elevated.
While medical staff are expertly trained and have excellent intuition, they are still human, and unfortunately, prone to the occasional mistake, which can lead to detrimental outcomes. Currently, medical errors are the third-leading cause of death in the U.S., claiming more than 250,000 lives each year. A prime example of this is the painful story of Lewis Blackman, a gifted 15-year-old student from South Carolina with the brightest of futures ahead of him. Lewis underwent a minimally-invasive operation to correct a defect in his chest wall. Due to heavy doses of opioid and other pain medications, combined with a series of staff errors, he developed severe ulcers which led to internal bleeding that eventually killed him a mere 30 hours after his initial procedure. Cases like Lewis Blackman’s are not uncommon, and hundreds of patients across the U.S. die every day from similar failure-to-rescue events.
