Page 70 - Security Today, October 2020

showed that the patient wasn’t in his bed and surveillance cameras throughout the hospital pinned down his location before he was able to leave the building.
More Efficient Response, Lowered Costs
At Lee Health in southwest Florida, which operates 35 medical facilities including two specialty hospitals, IP surveillance cameras not only improve the facilities’ security, but ensure that patients are being provided with high-quality care. Among the focus there are patients who may pose a fall risk.
Falls are a major problem in healthcare settings, especially in hospitals where the risk factors are heightened. Each year, between 700,000 and 1 million people in the United States fall in hospitals, according to The Joint Commission, the nation’s oldest and largest standards-setting and accrediting body in healthcare. Anywhere from 30 to 50 percent of patients who fall sustain an injury, according to Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality.
Lee Health was forced to hire retired healthcare professionals to sit in the rooms of high-risk patients to ensure their safety. Now, howev- er, the group can quickly mount wireless network cameras in rooms to monitor patients at risk of falling. By connecting to a video decoder, the live video feed is immediately displayed on a monitor at the nurse’s station. The technology allows Lee Health to monitor these high-risk patients more efficiently and has a cost-saving benefit, too, since the total annual cost of hiring “sitters” for at-risk patients is $1.6 million to a hospital.
Other efficiencies are delivered through alarm verification. A study published in the Journal of Hospital Medicine showed that more than 90 percent of patient alarms are non-actionable or nuisance alarms. In fact, nuisance alarms are widely recognized to be a leading con- tributor of alarm fatigue — a sensory overload and de-sensitization to alarms among healthcare workers — resulting in missed alarms and delayed response times. By using video to validate patient telemetry
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alarms, hospitals can quickly dismiss nuisance alarms and direct their teams where they are most needed.
Remote Monitoring of COVID-19 Patients
Remote monitoring of surveillance cameras used for clinical pur- poses also provide a level of safety to those on the front lines of the coronavirus pandemic. Because remote monitoring helps reduce direct contact with patients, it minimizes the risk of contagion to healthcare workers, lowers the spread of the virus, and helps to stretch the supply of single-use personal protective equipment (PPE). Overall, remote monitoring can aid hospitals that are experiencing a surge in patients by more efficiently using staff and resources.
Temporary hospitals, the likes of which have been erected during the pandemic, can benefit from video door stations, which include both an IP network camera and a built-in microphone and speaker for two-way audio communication.
This type of unit can easily be strapped to an IV pole as a simple and mobile device. If the patient needs attention, he or she can push the button to send an alert to the nurse’s station allowing the nurse to see the patient and providing them with the ability to talk to one another. Remote monitoring of COVID-19 patients allows medical profession- als to be proactive with their response, which again can help with the level of PPE that they may need.
When you consider that there are nearly 1 million hospital beds in the United States alone, the potential use of IP network video, audio and analytics to improve patient care is enormous. Remote monitoring adds an extra layer of patient observation and accelerates the response to emergencies. The concept is scalable and return on investment is in months, not years. The use of IP surveillance technology in healthcare today is not only making hospitals smarter, it’s making them safer, too.
Paul Baratta is the segment development manager, Healthcare, Axis Communications Inc.
Remote Monitoring
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campuslifesecurity.com | SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2020
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