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| Nurse Call System in operation |
Thinking of a Nurse Call System at first thought might make you think that this post is useless because a nurse call system is as simple as a push button that is mounted near the patient and it will make a light, mounted above patient's door, glow up for a nurse on a nearby nurse station to come and see what the patient needs. Well, I am glad to tell you that this is old school nurse call system!
The nurse call system that I’d like to point out in my post here is a system that is so advanced that it almost feels so futuristic. As you can imagine with me, the system will decide based on data coming from different medical equipment monitoring the patient what kind of alert to be triggered and to which doctors or nurses to send this alert to. Important data will be sent via a wireless connection to a tablet or a Smartphone that will inform the doctor or nurse with specific details of the patient’s condition. Such a nurse call system would be very useful to hospitals in saving patient lives; moreover, it will decrease the probability of a patient dying due to misinformed alarm etc
How such Nurse Call system works?
It is telecommunication at its peak, and one can wonder how medical companies are able to make such systems as the core of a nurse call system is a communication system that is IP based and connected to a server that in turn will make decisions what to do and how to alert certain group of people when a certain parameter, that is acquired from a patient, is acquired then it will send useful information related to the patient under emergency to the group of specialists that are responsible for this patient. So it is mainly telecommunication domain where there are packets of data that are sent stored and received. So what is the role of a biomedical engineer in such a system?
The most important role of a biomedical engineer regarding this complicated system is that he has to know how to program the system and allocate patients to nurses and nurse stations and allocated priorities for each nurse. In short, the biomedical engineer must know how to operate the system so that he can train nurses, doctors and anyone that will use the system. Some companies provide these programming services and sometimes they can also monitor their systems remotely. But to keep things going someone in the hospital must know how things are done. Mainly the program interface is simple and user-friendly and is not so complicated at all to a certain extent. Also, he has to make sure that those devices that are integrated into the system, like the patient monitor, is sending data via its network cable.
The Top companies providing such advanced nurse call systems are:
Hill Room: Ascom (GE nurse call system was acquired by Ascom)
An IT specialist might be better doing all these tasks because it is more related to his job than a biomedical engineer/technician but he will have no medical background and thus might find it hard to explain to doctors or nurses what to do and how to do it.
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