That’s the future as Cerner All Together, a health care systems and IT company based in Kansas City, Mo., sees it. They are sharing their vision with hospitals across the country, including Carondelet St. Mary’s Hospital last week.
Cerner teamed up with Nurture, a Michigan-based furniture company, to put together what they call the Smart Semi. It has traveled more than 20,000 miles and stopped in roughly 80 cities displaying its newest technology.
  
|
The caregiver station displayed a medication dispensing unit called the CareAware RxStation. This device is utilized to hold medications for patients on certain floors. The clinician will sign in with their unique user log-in code then select the patient they are getting medication for. If that medication is in the patient file it will allow a drawer to be opened and the clinician to access that one medication only.
“Then eventually we would close the loop further by scanning a tag of the patient’s and scanning the medication before administering it,” said Dan Eakin, a client executive with Cerner. “This way we ensure it is the right medication, for the right patient, at the right time, in the right dosage. It will reduce errors and will give some more peace of mind to nurses.”
The Smart Room had a patient bed set up, new gadgets on the shelves and three TV screens providing different information at different.
The software architecture called CareAware enables interconnectivity of medical devices such as vital signs monitors, ventilators and other physiological monitoring devices to the patient’s electronic Medical Record. Once these machines and devices are connected, they can automatically place information into the record, saving caregivers time and decreasing the chances of errors related to manual entry of the information, or delayed entry of the information.
While trying to increase the patient’s experience, Cerner developed what they call myStation, an information and data station from which patients can access their personal health records, learn about doctors and nurses providing their care, access the internet, order meals, take surveys about their care at the hospital, review movies and play games. It also allows the patient control of shutters and lighting in the room instead of calling a nurse to lower the shade or turn lights out.
When a clinician walks into the room a RoomWizard reads the person’s badge by proximity and shows the patient who has entered the room. There are also computer tablets in the room instead of patient charts that have all the updated information in the record for the clinician to review.
“We want documentation to become an outcome of patient care and not a separate process,” said Mark Amey, Carondelet’s CIO and regional CIO for Ascension Health’s western region. “We’re very excited about this technology.”
“We wanted Cerner to bring its display here so we could get doctors and nurses familiar with what we want to do,” said Tony Fonze, the director of IT applications for the Carondelet Health Network. “We wanted to give them an ultimate vision of us down the road.”
Contact reporter Joe Pangburn at jpangburn@azbiz.com or (520) 295-4259.
Comments