Virtual Monitoring
Healthcare facilities around the country struggle to keep their patients safe from falling. Learn about patient falls, why they happen, and how Ocuvera is working to prevent them.
Virtual Monitoring
Why Use Virtual Monitoring
It can be challenging for nurses to know what is happening in patient rooms. There are many reasons why patients might need additional observation beyond what nurses can provide while balancing their daily workload. In addition to fall risk patients, confused or impulsive patients, patients in detox, patients who are elopement risks, and more require special attention that nurses may not have the resources to provide. In-room sitters are very costly and aren’t proven effective at reducing falls. Being able to monitor these patients from outside the hospital room is key to improving patient safety and reducing the risk of adverse events.
Approaches
types of virtual monitoring
Healthcare facilities use a variety of different methods to observe patients remotely. Central video monitoring, where nurses or technicians watch patients from a central location, has been shown to reduce falls. However, this is expensive and requires sustained, careful attention from nurses who are susceptible to attention fatigue and human error. Some virtual monitoring solutions, like smart sitters, offload the burden on nursing staff by outsourcing the monitoring to off-site technicians. This approach can introduce delays during critical moments and still suffers many of the same drawbacks as in-person sitters.
Ocuvera's Solution
smart virtual monitoring
Unlike many other digital health solutions, the Ocuvera system integrates directly into existing hospital workflows, without the need to rely on sitters or monitoring technicians from outside of your organization. When using the Ocuvera system as a virtual sitter, nurses have access to continuous live streams of patient rooms. Whenever they see dangerous patient behavior, nurses can simply press a button to immediately alert another nurses on the floor. They can also enable two-way audio at any time to speak directly to the patient. Click below to learn more about virtual patient care with Ocuvera.