Читать книгу Do No Harm - Matthew Webster - Страница 15

If we step back in time a hundred years, there were only a small number of electronic medical machines. They were bulky, crude, and not able to store or send information. Everything had to be done by hand. By modern standards, this is painstakingly slow and inefficient. Now we have streamlined systems that not only can alert, but help with centralization of alerts meaning that, for example, a nurse does not have to be in physical proximity to a patient and/or device to be aware of a potential problem. While not everything connects together harmoniously, many devices are centralized to create alerts. In a hospital setting this is particularly important because a nurse does not have to hear an alarm from the physical machine in order to know there is an issue with a patient. A random walkthrough of the environment is not required. Nurses can be more focused on patients. Not only that, but patients who need long-term monitoring and want freedom from being at a hospital can get the care they need thanks to remote monitoring. This means the patient has a better quality of life.

Four types of medical monitoring devices are important to consider—wearable, on the skin, ingestible, and implanted. Some of these are sensory in nature, which means they can collect information or detect problems and relay them back to a centralized information source and potentially provide an alert. They are electronic in nature and can have a variety of follow-on actions such as alert for emergency medical systems.

Other systems are more protective and can respond, in a limited way, to the environment. These are referred to as smart systems. A good example of this is implanted insulin-releasing needles. If the blood sugar levels are off, the smart system can release the appropriate level of insulin to best protect the patient. In some cases, this can literally transform the lives of those who are diabetic, making it possible for them to have almost near normal lives.

With these kinds of transformations, you can imagine that the demand is very high from the patient. From the hospital's perspective, they can do more with less staff than ever before. The automated alerts mean that they do not necessarily need around-the-clock care watching over the patients if they are not in the hospital. This reduces cost for the hospital and the patient, so all-in-all this is a win-win situation.