Request Demo



COVID-19 Surge Preparedness

 

Preparedness is not a new concept for hospitals and health systems, and it goes far beyond the walls of the hospital itself. Hospitals and health systems prepare for multiple different types of mass casualty incidents, including public health emergencies. 

The COVID-19 pandemic presented new challenges for the healthcare system and pushed system preparedness plans to their limits. It has inundated hospital systems globally, as they prepared to accommodate the surge of patients requiring advanced levels of care. Pandemic preparedness has not been this widely needed, nor was it urgently needed, in the last several decades.

Multiple different agencies provided guidance and resources for general readiness and how to best address the needs of the COVID-19 pandemic. The CDC, AHA, WHO, CMS, and HHS shared resource guides that included various tools and resources to assist hospitals and health systems in responding to the pandemic. 

At the beginning of the pandemic, hospitals were tasked with delaying elective surgeries, shifting traditional in-person provider visits to telehealth and virtual platforms, researching and implementing ways of keeping staff and patients safe, and implementing surge plans to care for additional patients. These were just a few of the items that had to be addressed. Facilities had to coordinate the procurement of additional medical supplies and medical equipment to care for the projected numbers of patients that the hospital could surge to. 

ViSi Mobile was a solution for monitoring all the vital signs and could be installed as quickly as the facility was ready to implement the technology. 

Staffing to the potential surges amidst providers and medical staff becoming ill with COVID-19 was an additional challenge and needed to be met. Leaders had to look at how to best care for patients while ensuring the best methods for keeping staff safe. Technology was a friend of medical professionals allowing them to care for patients while maintaining a safe distance from patients in many instances. 

ViSi Mobile is a surveillance monitoring vitals signs monitor that measures all vital signs. And with the continuous non-invasive blood pressure monitoring, the nurse can limit the number of times they have to go in the patient's environment and still have all vital signs beat to beat. It minimizes the need for face-to-face interactions which helps address staffing shortages and reduces the risk of interacting more than necessary with COVID-19 positive patients. This not only keeps clinicians safe but also ensures that patients are getting the best care.

The ViSi Mobile monitoring system offers the ability to continuously and remotely monitor all core vital signs including heart rate, respiration, SpO2, skin temperature, and continuous noninvasive blood pressure (cNIBP). Additionally, ViSi Mobile’s advanced capabilities such as recognition of life-threatening arrhythmia (V-Tach, V-Fib, Asystole, Atrial Fibrillation, and RVR) as well as patient posture were other key features that elevated the vital sign monitoring system into a class of its own.

In fact, the ViSi Mobile patient monitoring system was utilized in three rounds of COVID-19 Alternative Care at the Georgia World Congress Center in Atlanta, GA to help save lives. The focus was to rapidly deploy a vital sign system that would provide lifesaving insight to clinicians and reduce the cost of the patient’s care. The need for speed, closer monitoring of the patient’s condition, and a reduction in treatment expense was met by Sotera Wireless’s ViSi Mobile system.



Sources:

https://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/handle/10665/151281/9789241548939_eng.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

https://www.cms.gov/files/document/qso-20-13-hospitalspdf.pdf-2

https://www.phe.gov/Preparedness/COVID19/Documents/COVID-19%20Healthcare%20Planning%20Checklist.pdf

https://www.aha.org/system/files/media/file/2020/05/Covid-19-Credit-Ratings.pdf

https://www.soterawireless.com/news/visi-mobile-utilized-at-georgia-covid-19-alternative-care-facility-to-save-lives

Filed Under: Nurses, COVID-19, diseases, awareness, ViSi Mobile