The New York Presbyterian Hospital Innovation Center

Since technology continues to improve and many individuals can access the mobile technology and the internet, health care units are expected to adapt to the changes in technology in all the sections including medicine, patient communication, and engagement. In the New York-Presbyterian Healthcare System, there is an effective use of patient-care care technologies, communication systems, and the information system in the health unit. This organization is able to achieve this because of the motivated Innovation Center team and other programs.

The management of the health system had in recent years came up with a strategic decision to bind its strengths and concentrate on its innovative efforts by starting the Innovation Center.  This center has worked with different departments inside the organization and with other healthcare systems to bring together effective ideologies from the wide network of the organization and turn them into something productive. Since the launch of the center, the organization has implemented different enhancements that utilize technology to advance the experience of patients. The organization formed William Randolph Hearst Burn Center which was considered to be the first unit. The employees were asked to deduce ideas that will make technology work for them and the Burn Unit was then equipped better and reliable phones, tablets and many other communication tools which aim at improving communication within the hospital. This can also be taken as the model for innovating the organization’s units as the hospital progresses.

Other techniques that have been brought in include auto texting which offers the family members of a patient with real-time notifications concerning the situation of their member who is undergoing surgery or any other risk treatment (Schoen, Osborn, Squires, Doty, Rasmussen, Pierson, & Applebaum, 2012). The organization also initiated a project that issued tablets to patients which will allow them to access the internet and the chance to review their own health information and communicate with their nurses form their beds. This plan will also help patients to educate themselves about the treatment plan. Furthermore, the tablets will permit physicians and nurses to visually talk about treatment plans and enlighten their patients and their families with no difficulties.

The organization has been able to develop different innovations such as the NYP Patient Whiteboard that combines some of the same patient-specific data like the patient tablet to form a complete swap of information between the patients, families, and nurses. The screens will offer a real-time, digital data about the care team of the patient, phone numbers, their pain score, the risk of falling and the planned radiology examinations. These boards assist in raising transparency and placate while a patient is still staying at the New York Presbyterian.

The hospital also launched the next-generation intensive care unit (ICU) system which will offer patients an extra level of intensive care. The technological system is referred to as EICU which utilizes the modern software and video technology to coordinate patients remotely. It will be used by the experienced intensive care physicians and nurses who will be overseeing the unit for 24 hours every day. The coordination will be done from a high-tech centralized center that permits for early discovery and proactive intrusion.

This system was created to allow the healthcare unit to standardize intensive care even though there was a shortage of healthcare experts while there was an increase in the population of the critically sick people. The few physicians and nurses in the EICU were coordinating the vital signs of the patients, ventilators and intravenous pumps (Topol, & Teirstein, 2015). They also monitored the lab outcomes and the prescriptions, the history of the patients, treatments and other notes. This technology uses an alert system that depends on complex software algorithms to examine the data of patients which makes it possible for a faster response after the psychological markers show that a dangerous occasion is in the making.

The video and audio links allow the command centers to coordinate the patient and communicate with caregivers by the use of the video camera and speakers that have been installed in every ICU room. The video camera is regulated with desktop mouse and has the ability to zoom in on a patient to conduct detailed analysis or to observe the instrument screen in detail. This watchful care makes sure that emergency events are communicated proactively and the patient does not have an extra specialist physician to assist in making an informed decision.

 The organization has also ventured into 48 ICU including the step-down beds as one of their new systems. The system will be available to all the branches of the NewYork-Presbyterian Healthcare System. This system is believed to decrease the medical errors and at reducing the cost. It is also believed that the efficient utilization of ICU caregivers could highly decrease the mortality rate in the United States intensive-care units. The decrease in cost occurs because of the short time people take to stay in the hospital (Kripalani, Theobald, Anctil, & Vasilevskis, 2014).

Executive Summary

The health unit has been working together with other organizations on new ideas and views from the dynamic health technology ecosystem. This can be shown when the organization opened the devoted space at Blueprint Health Accelerator which is a coached driven startup accelerator framework that reinforces business people who are forming innovative companies at the intersection of health and technology.  This collaboration was meant to improve innovation and technology projects which will assist in bringing in current technologies to assists in the activities of New York-Presbyterian.

The health unit also has the objectives of engaging the local technology community where the organization hosted the NYC hospital hackathon and the innovated NYP to encourage creativity and divergent thinking. The main purpose of the hackathon was to come up with solutions to advance NYP which is the online patient portal for appointments and many other issues related to patients. Different working prototypes were created for the online portal.  After successful establishment of hackoth, the organization initiated a website which will make it easier for business people to share their ideas with the management of the hospital. Another use of the website is that it is the platform for the public users that allow them to tag along with the development of projects and events in the Innovation Center.

The organization also aims to continue to engage and understand how they can assist patients at New York-Presbyterian with the help of tech community. Markedly, the organization has decided to start a new challenge known as the InnovateNYP and it is an open challenge which allows the participants to find, prototype and create innovative technological solutions for patients to experience and offer communications.  The purpose of this challenge is to collect different ideas on techniques for experience personalization of the patients, their education and how they can entertain themselves.  It also focuses on the techniques of collaboration which encompasses patient document grouping and patient care tracking. The challenge was open to both the public and the staff and there will be different awards for the winners.

References

Schoen, C., Osborn, R., Squires, D., Doty, M., Rasmussen, P., Pierson, R., & Applebaum, S. (2012). A survey of primary care doctors in ten countries shows progress in use of health information technology, less in other areas. Health affairs, 31(12), 2805-2816.

Schulman, J., Stricof, R., Stevens, T. P., Horgan, M., Gase, K., Holzman, I. R., ... & Simmonds, A. (2011). Statewide NICU central-line-associated bloodstream infection rates decline after bundles and checklists. Pediatrics, 127(3), 436-444.

Topol, E. J., & Teirstein, P. S. (2015). Textbook of interventional cardiology. Elsevier Health Sciences.

Kripalani, S., Theobald, C. N., Anctil, B., & Vasilevskis, E. E. (2014). Reducing hospital readmission rates: current strategies and future directions. Annual review of medicine, 65, 471-485.