Part III - The 'What If...' Machine

(Topic: Creating the Healthcare Internet of Things - HIoT)

New Year's resolutions abound with good intentions for a better life in the year to come. What if ... I tried this schedule or that new diet - perhaps it would make a real difference this time?

Wouldn't it be wonderful if there was a machine which could make our what ifs possible?

There may or may not be such a machine for personal improvement - but, it turns out, there is just such a one for use in the world of healthcare.

Last time, I promised to explain a little more about how connecting things in the hospital brings value. To do that I'll share three stories of Jason's high school adventures. The first involves our protagonist at the intersection of a revolution in the typing lab.

The Computer and The Typewriter Story

The personal computer was taking the world by storm.

Seen primarily as a clerical tool - a revolution for word processing - our local high school decided to ditch all of the recently purchased electronic typewriters to replace them with Commodore PET Computers.

But despite the fact that the new computers allowed greater flexibility for editing the whole document (electronic typewriters allowed only the current line of text to be edited), the printed output was nowhere near as neat.

The new computers came with printers of the dot matrix variety, fed by a continuous sheaf of perforated paper with tear-away guides on the side - a far cry from the beautiful, clean cut paper and crisp font output of the electronic typewriter.

Most people ignored the sub-optimal quality of the dot matrix printer because it represented progress.

But not Jason.

"Why," he reasoned, "should we be forced to accept this reduction in print quality as part of accepting the new computer technology? What if ... we found a way to connect the new computers to one of the surplussed electronic typewriters, to combine the best of both worlds?"

And that is exactly what he did.

Jason made it possible for his high school classmates to print letter quality work on single-sheeted, bond paper years before the invention of the laser printer.

Best of Breed Combinations - True HIoT

This is the kind of functionality he, and the team at Globestar Systems, later built into Connexall - the ability to seamlessly combine best of breed technologies to create better and more effective overall solutions in the healthcare environment.

Let's take the most common example of a contemporary healthcare integration: nurse call notifications to a third party device.

Nurse call is essentially a box on the wall which a patient activates with a corded button clipped to the bed. It also has buttons on the box itself which a clinician presses to request assistance or activate a Code Blue response. By regulation, the nurse call box is hard-wired to a light over the door and a panel of some description at the nursing station, in order to allow it to communicate with staff.

Thing is, this system, while reliable, is notoriously inefficient. What if no one is at the nursing station to see the blinking light? How do you contact the clinician responsible for a patient when they are working elsewhere in the ward? How do you know what the patient needs without walking to the room? In the case of multiple simultaneous calls, how do you know which call is most urgent?

Twenty years ago, Connexall knew there had to be a better way: "What if ... we connect a patient's nurse call directly to the clinician's cell phone, wireless phone, pager, badge or device of choice?"

Revolutionary thinking, which has powerfully impacted hospital workflow and patient satisfaction to this day.

So much so, that manufacturers of equipment and devices of various description, including nurse call, have learned from this success and created their own kinds of integration software to include with their products.

But with a catch.

Where Connexall was created to liberate hospital staff from the limitations of stand-alone systems - to allow different best of breed solutions to work together regardless of manufacture - manufacturers of those systems have created or acquired integration software with the intention of doing the opposite.

You may have heard the term: Healthcare Internet of Things (HIoT). This is what Connexall makes possible in the purest sense.

Many manufacturers also make the claim they provide HIoT, but, because their primary focus is selling their products, what they actually deliver is a Healthcare Internet of Their Things (HIoTT).

They offer middleware with their products which creates a closed system - slaved to their own equipment and devices - instead of middleware which is truly vendor neutral.

While this might seem attractive to some hospital administrators (ie. purchasing an all-in-one solution), the results are often less than satisfactory and for the same reason the original computer-printer solution described earlier was not.

No one single manufacturer has yet created a comprehensive suite of products that are best of breed. So accepting the 'one-vendor-multipurpose-knife' type solution always means compromising on quality, and ultimately patient and staff safety and satisfaction.

You should be free to pick and choose the technologies which work best for your hospital or health authority, combining proven solutions with contemporary winners.

And... when new technology becomes available and you ask the question, "what if ... we connect this new technology with that device into our current workflow?" You'll already know the answer is "yes!"

Next Time

We'll return to Jason's high school computer lab next time for a second story, which, I am hopeful, will illustrate another way Connexall may be used to improve Processes in your healthcare environment. :)