What exactly makes a hospital room “intelligent”?
At Cleveland-based University Hospitals, it means having high-powered cameras that allow virtual nurses to zoom into the room and AI technology that can detect falls.
“Our Intelligent Hospital Room project is a series of experiments, learnings and developments over time of not just changing how people work, but using of technology and artificial intelligence to help save space in a hospital and work smarter and help relieve some of the burdens,” Jennifer Carpenter, DNP, RN, chief nursing informatics officer of University Hospitals, told Becker’s.
One of the early experiments was using virtual nurses, located at a health system command center, to help care for patients remotely. The cameras are so powerful that they can read the names and doses of medications in the rooms or look at a patient’s pupils. “Yes, there’s no touch, but they can see almost anything remotely,” Dr. Carpenter said.
University Hospitals nurses are also working to train AI to detect falls through a live video feed, participating in FDA clearance studies to ensure it’s an appropriate use of the technology. “We do a lot of things to keep people safe from falls,” Dr. Carpenter said, “but we think artificial intelligence, over time, can learn physical cues: moving toward the side of the bed, one leg out, an arm.”
The health system has 14 intelligent rooms at the UH Parma (Ohio) Medical Center emergency department and is outfitting 153 beds at UH Lake West Medical Center in Willoughby, Ohio, with the technology, tentatively set to go live July 14. Other health systems — such as Columbus-based OhioHealth, Paramus, N.J.-based Valley Health System, and Omaha-based Nebraska Medicine — are experimenting with smart rooms.
University Hospitals’ virtual nursing program differs from some others in that the nurses, all employed by the health system, switch back and forth between remote work and the bedside. The care model has also helped with retention, allowing experienced nurses to move to a hybrid schedule and stay on the job longer. Other staffers like patient sitters, physical therapists and respiratory therapists are able to connect virtually with patients as well.
“We’re learning how many different things the nurses can do where they don’t have to physically be in the same room with the patient,” Dr. Carpenter said. “We’re never, in my lifetime, going to have a point where there won’t be nurses needed to take care of patients in the hospital. But there are a lot of important things from a regulatory perspective, important things for keeping patients safe, that can be done by people anywhere.”
The health system has been building up the technology thanks to a $10 million grant from the Veale Foundation. The biggest expense has been opening up walls to install the wiring, Dr. Carpenter said.
The return on investment comes from monitoring multiple patients concurrently when that used to require individual sitters. University Hospitals is also analyzing the technology’s effects on nursing productivity.
The health system also hopes to layer in AI capabilities that analyze data from the EHR, IV pumps and patient beds for faster insights.
“This is just the beginning,” Dr. Carpenter said. “In healthcare, the demands are great, and we’ve got to change. We’ve got to learn faster, and healthcare tends to be a little late on some of that change. So this has been a great opportunity for us to get ahead and to engage our teams in doing something different.”
