Speakers:
Paul Booth , Memorial Sloan- Kettering Cancer Center
Joseph Bulsak, IBM Global Services
Patrick Carragee, Memorial Sloan- Kettering Cancer Center
Marc Clay, Hill-Rom
Mary Dowling, RN, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center
Paul Frisch, Memorial Sloan- Kettering Cancer Center
Bob Glinski, Cardiopulmonary Associates
Elias Golfinopoulos, Memorial Sloan- Kettering Cancer Center
Neil Halpern, MD, Memorial Sloan- Kettering Cancer Center
Craig Laramee, PhD, State University of New York at Binghamton
Dan McGuirk, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center
Ken McLeod,  PhD, State University of  New York at Binghamton
Michael McNeal, Emergin Inc.
Saul Miodownik, Memorial Sloan- Kettering Cancer Center
Blanca Vasquez-Clarfield, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center                    

Synopsis :

The deployment of new wireless and network technologies coupled with advanced clinical applications and devices have significantly increased the quality and the quantity of patient diagnostic and monitoring information.  Increasing workloads and reduced staffing, have revealed difficulties in effectively prioritizing and handling this information and have resulted in increased equipment-related errors, patient dissatisfaction, the potential for patient injury, and an increasing overall concern for patient safety.  Concerns about this trend have prompted the Joint Commission to established seven patient safety initiatives geared to the patient environment of care. These include establishing methodologies and protocols to reduce the probability of errors, and providing an enhanced level of communications.

The goals of this interdisciplinary workshop will focus on the requirements, development methodology, and deployment criteria of an integrated institutional biomedical information network solution.  This solution integrates all clinical devices (wired and wireless) within the patient care environment onto a common infrastructure.  It enables all critical clinical parameters and alarms to be filtered, prioritized, and automatically be directed to key staff responsible for patient care.   The ability to process, prioritize, and direct critical patient alarm information establishes a safer patient care environment and directly addresses the JCAHO patient safety initiatives. 

The session will address the complex informational needs within a clinical environment and identify the redundancy inherent to multiple discrete clinical systems.  The session will include with discussions on infrastructure requirements, wired and wireless,  management of wireless access points, and escalating needs resulting from more and more devices operating wirelessly.   The workshop will address the issues of centralized  data acquisition from multiple devices including information processing, filtering, consolidating and data sharing.  Central to the focus of this workshop are issues of event management and the dissemination of the resulting critical alarm data to appropriate care providers via wireless communication devices.  Dissemination of this critical data is dependent on the ability establish a dynamic association between devices used in patient care (infusion pumps, monitoring devices, ventilators, etc.), and the staff assigned to provide that care.  The application of bar coding and RF-ID to provide an automated and dynamic association methodology will be reviewed.  Issues of directed voice communications and alarm annunciation using voice over IP (VoIP) will be presented.    Any system conveying critical alarm information needs to consider the magnitude of alarms and establish methodologies to manage, filter and intelligently convert discrete alarm parameters into clinically useful information.  Separating real time raw clinical data and the processed clinical information permanently stored in an electronic medical record is considered within the scope of the workshop.   The workshop will conclude with a dedicated open forum panel discussion addressing these topics as an integrated solution.

Workshop Schedule