Please find the 2011 ECRI report. Download ECRI Top 10 Health Tech Hazards 2011
What is very interesting is the discussion of item 5. This pertains to the most recent patent award LinkSense (including) I, and the cross licensing of this to www.capsuletech.com. I have most recently last week, run into another medical device company that simply feels that enabling bar code scanning (actually embedding a scan engine), into their device makes sense. After coming from the Auto-ID industry, I do know the market. However, this is not the point. The point is looking at this from the "clinician" perspective. How are they going to handle perhaps this application (for association of patient ID, medical device, and clinician ID), as well as the same type of bar code application for the EMR, and yes, another bar code application for the smart infusion pump. This is where the Capsule Neuron fits it in. It is patient centric. Using RFID (and no this is not expensive), the medical devices will be able to "auto" associate and "dis-associate" as well as the patient ID and clinician ID. The clinician simply has to confirm on the screen and the correlation is made with an HL-7 messaging stream sent out. When you provide automation at the point of care, all kinds of new rules and algorithms can be built. For example, when the ventilator is moved away from the patient into the hallway (i.e. disconnected), no longer do you have to call or forget to call the RT to pick it up. The auto-disassociation triggers a text or email to the RT, that this specific ventilator in this specific room needs to be picked up. Same with the infusion pump, a text or email is sent to SPD to pick up the pump for cleaning. This can only happen when automation occurs in the background, not adding more and more manual intervention. I would compare the clinician to an aircraft captain. While we have two different industries both share the same common attributes. The aircraft captain of today simply cannot handle all the complexities of flying a Airbus or 747 on an overseas flight for eight hours plus.
That is why automated sub-systems and auto-pilot exist. As a result flying has the highest safety record in the industry. Same with the clinician. As you provide more automation in the background, the job becomes easier, they can concentrate on taking care of the patient (like the captain actually flying the plane), the potential for risk goes down as well as costs. I would not want to get on 747 to fly from Los Angeles to Japan with a 20 year veteran captain using only a compass, altimeter, and turn and bank indicator.
