After evaluating multiple competitive solutions, Montage Health selected Wachter Healthcare Solutions, which designs, installs, and maintains patient observation technologies to improve patient safety and staff utilization at hospitals, psychiatric centers, and surgical centers.Īs shown in Figure 1, each equipped room at the hospital features mobile carts outfitted with high-definition cameras that provide 360-degree views, as well as pan, tilt, zoom, and night vision capabilities. To reduce the risk of spreading infection, only a primary nurse and a primary physician were allowed into rooms with COVID-19 patients, eliminating the option of in-person patient monitoring.Īs a less costly and more efficient alternative to in-person monitoring, Montage Health decided to deploy a virtual monitoring tool at the hospital. Like other healthcare facilities during the pandemic, the 258-bed hospital struggled with a shortage of supplies, personal protective equipment (PPE), and staff. The COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated the hospital’s challenges.
Such traditional patient monitoring solutions are expensive, and they created staffing issues for the hospital, which struggled to meet all the requests for 1:1 patient sitters.
High Costs, Staffing Issues Drive Shift to Remote Monitoringīefore deploying NOVA, Community Hospital of the Monterey Peninsula would assign CNAs to sit in at-risk patients’ rooms 24/7 to prevent falls, medical device tampering, and other incidents that could lead to injury and add time and cost to hospital stays. For Community Hospital of the Monterey Peninsula, which deployed NOVA in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, the remote monitoring solution has already reduced patient falls by 30 percent, increased patient satisfaction, and lowered staffing costs. With its open architecture-featuring IoT gateways, workstations, and servers powered by Intel® processors-NOVA can be implemented easily and scaled to help any healthcare system optimize patient care. The turnkey Nursing Observation and Virtual Assistant (NOVA) solution allows trained technicians to monitor up to 12 patients at once from a remote monitoring station, providing a virtual window into the condition and status of patients, and freeing nursing staff to focus on other clinical responsibilities. To address these challenges, Community Hospital of the Monterey Peninsula, a Montage Health hospital, augmented existing in-person patient monitoring with a HIPAA-compliant virtual patient observation solution from Wachter Healthcare Solutions, a brand of the operational technology systems integrator Wachter Inc. In addition to being time- and resource-intensive, this approach leads to staffing challenges when certified nursing assistants (CNAs) and other staff are repeatedly pulled off the floor, leaving nurses burdened with additional responsibilities. To reduce the number of patient falls and improve overall patient safety, many healthcare facilities employ observation assistants, or patient sitters, who monitor at-risk patients from their bedsides.
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