Hospital monitoring systems that summon help in a heartbeat
It is a moment seared on Prince Ade-Odunlade’s memory. When he was a senior manager at an NHS trust in England’s Midlands, a psychiatric patient died after staff failed to notice an abrupt deterioration in the man’s physical health. At the subsequent inquest, Ade-Odunlade promised the patient’s family he would do his utmost to prevent a similar tragedy occurring in future. “I felt this sense of loss with the family,” he recalls. “And my promise is that I will do everything in my capacity to . . . minimise, or completely stop, inpatient deaths.”
His staff identified a potential solution in a piece of technology invented by Oxehealth, an Oxford university spinout founded a decade ago. Its Oxevision monitoring system uses infrared-sensitive cameras placed in patients’ rooms to measure pulse and breathing rates remotely. Alerts are sent when potentially high-risk activity is detected — for example, if a patient spends a prolonged time in the bathroom. Ade-Odunlade, who is now chief operating officer at Derbyshire NHS Foundation Trust — which has also adopted the software — believes it may have saved his patient’s life, as it could have tipped off staff about the changes in vital signs.
Oxevision is now being used in half of all mental health trusts in England, and its enthusiastic embrace by the NHS is explained partly by statistics about the number of mental health inpatients who come to harm. Unexpected or unintended events caused the death of one psychiatric hospital inpatient every 2,700 occupied bed days, compared with one death every 26,000 days for acute or general hospital inpatients. “While there are many reasons for that difference, broadly speaking, it is an order of magnitude more dangerous to be a mental health inpatient than a general hospital inpatient,” notes Hugh Lloyd-Jukes, Oxehealth’s chief executive.
This story originally appeared on: Financial Times - Author:Sarah Neville
