The ability to monitor patients during hospital stays is crucial to ensuring that clinicians have the data they need to provide high-quality patient care. During the pandemic, it has been especially critical for caregivers to have the option to take patient vitals from afar to minimize their risk of exposure.
Due to the highly contagious nature of COVID-19, there is also a renewed focus on enhancing wireless patient monitoring capabilities and potentially expanding the applications for the equipment in the years ahead.
As Dip Niraula, medical equipment technician at Agiliti, recently said in a roundtable with TechNation:
“Wireless patient monitoring… will greatly help in patient transportation, flexible acuity monitoring, patient mobility and data integration among other things. Additionally, with the availability of web interconnectivity patient monitoring most likely will expand to remote monitoring from patient homes and 24/7 in daily activities.”
Some other topics discussed at this roundtable include:
- The evolution of patient monitoring
- Impacts of COVID-19 on patient monitoring
- Securing operating platforms from cyberattacks
- HTM training opportunities
Read the TechNation Patient Monitoring Roundtable.
Beyond Patient Monitoring: The Future of Medical Equipment Management
It’s not just patient monitoring efforts that have been affected by the novel coronavirus, but the healthcare landscape in general. Aside from assessing new technologies to keep clinicians and patients safe, hospitals have also had to reckon with long-existing gaps in procurement and supply chain processes.
It has become clearer to hospital leadership that implementing new processes is needed in order to safeguard equipment availability to clinicians.
However, with the influx of equipment in hospitals during the pandemic, hospitals and health systems have had their hands full trying to manage this flood of new equipment and supplies.
Agiliti recently spoke with several healthcare executives and collected their feedback regarding their approach when changing their equipment supply chain, procurement process and inventory management.
With this information, we put together an executive report that includes strategies related to:
- Strengthening medical equipment inventory management
- Implementing multi-site collaboration networks
- Effectively leveraging third-party support
- Planning for a transition to non-peak periods
