Improving Patient Transfer

Today’s intra-hospital patient transport has become an important part of healthcare delivery. It is a complex and highly sensitive process that requires adherence to high quality and safety standards. It is also a time-consuming task for nurses working in critical care areas, often resulting in nurses performing various tasks with higher physical and psychological requirements. The process can be stressful for both the patient and the nurse in charge of the transfer especially in emergency room, the operating room, and the intensive care unit where patients need very close surveillance and doctors need real-time information on the patient’s vital signs.

CARESCAPE ONE is an advanced lightweight plug-and-play monitoring solution for conducting intra-hospital patient transport. It allows nurses to visually monitor critical patient conditions with precision during active patient transport between care areas. The solution is a portable monitor device with docking capability on the transport bed or at the bedside. It is designed to provide an efficient workflow with the added benefit of relative ease of use for new as well as experienced users. The system also provides a standardized yet fully flexible platform with one device and one software to support cost effective fleet management.

A unique feature that contributes to the ease of use and flexibility of application across the healthcare institute is the CARESCAPE parameter concept. Using CARESCAPE ONE with CARESCAPE parameters appropriate to the patient means that only one standard CARECAPE ONE device is required and the parameter set is tailored by simply connecting the required parameters. This flexibility extends to the ability to use different pulse oximetry technologies in different care areas to provide the optimum monitoring solution and patient care. As a result, healthcare facilities benefit from optimized device inventory and reduced caregiver stress caused by the correctly configured device not always being available.

“Our mission at GE Healthcare is to save lives in moments that matter - CARESCAPE ONE is a good demonstration of this mission. We are proud to partner with Medhold to make a lasting impact in intra-hospital transport across South Africa’s healthcare facilities,” said Graham Maritz, General Manager GE Healthcare Southern Africa.

Both qualitative and quantitative results from a recent comparative usability study conducted to assess the workflow impact and evaluate productivity gains during active patient transport using the CARESCAPE ONE as compared with a patient transport monitor of similar class showed that CARESCAPE ONE can help improve patient transport safety and staff efficiency. Specifically, the study found that participants using the CARECAPE ONE monitor experienced overall 26% less patient transport time, and 60% fewer user errors in performing routine transport tasks.