Sensitron, Inc.

Sensitron, Inc., based in San Mateo, Calif., is an international wireless healthcare innovations company that has developed careTrends® for the med-surg units and Critical careTrends™ for the critical/intensive care units—both of which communicate vital signs and other data from wirelessly-enabled, legacy point-of-care medical devices at the patient bedside. Sensitron, Inc. was founded in 1997, is a privately-held company and is expanding internationally via channel partners.

Situation

In terms of nursing, there is a huge (and growing) nursing shortage and their time is precious and stretched. Additionally, there is a significant delay in caregivers’ access to the relevant patient data and that data itself is unorganized and full of transcription errors.

Solution

Sensitron’s careTrends® is a client/server wireless patient monitoring solution that automatically captures and records patient vital signs from bedside vital sign monitors (VSMs) and sends that data to the client software (ie. a laptop or tablet PC running the client software). Once on the client, the data is available for the caregiver to view and accept, after which the data is transmitted wirelessly to the careTrends server. From there that data can be populated into a hospital’s CIS database via HL-7. That data is then available immediately over a browser from anywhere (including back at the patient bedside, itself) and can also be interfaced to other hospital systems.

Critical careTrends™ automatically gathers patient data from hemodynamic and other monitoring systems connected to the patient and stores that data. The data is identified with a timestamp and IDs for the patient, the caregiver and the bed--thereby providing an electronic audit trail. The data can then be retrieved from the Critical careTrends database into the patient’s electronic clinical record in the hospital’s Clinical Information System. This eliminates the need for manual documentation, providing significant time saving.

Better Health & Lower Costs

At one hospital, for the 8 AM vital signs shift, by 8:15 AM, before careTrends’ implementation, only 7-8% of the patient vital signs were available in the hospital’s computer system (and, hence, available to other caregivers). Within 2 weeks of careTrends’ implementation, over 80% of that data was available to the caregivers. By 9 AM, 100% of that data was available.



According to a case study that Intel did of a careTrends installation at Christus Spohn Beeville: transcription errors were eliminated, caregivers saved 35-40 minutes per shift, clinicians no longer had any difficulty reading patient vital signs and charts, and the percentage of physicians who reported experiencing delays in caring for patients because of vital signs not being charted dropped from 57% to 20%.