GRAND RAPIDS, Mich.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--A new healthcare awards program honors three organizations that have advanced patient and staff safety, eased the working lives of nurses and achieved new efficiencies in care delivery.
Called the AvaPrizes, they are awarded by AvaSure, the maker and distributor of the AvaSys video monitoring system, now in use in hundreds of hospitals nationwide. Together, the winners represent a continuing evolution in the role of video monitoring as it becomes a vital tool in patient care and staff development throughout a healthcare organization.
And the winners are:
Salina (Kan.) Regional Health Center, which earns the Patient Safety Excellence Award for the most complete AvaSys program. Salina has focused on a number of bedside safety areas, including preventing patient falls, stopping patients from removing protect tubes/lines, enhancing self-harm precautions and keeping watch on alcohol/drug withdrawal patients. Salina has also used AvaSys in infection control isolation rooms and to prevent patients from wandering out of the hospital, among other applications.
“Using our unique ability to gather and analyze data from our clients’ use of AvaSys, it was clear that Salina stood out from the crowd for having the broadest spectrum program of video monitoring,” said Brad W. Playford, AvaSure’s founder and CEO. “We see this organization as a model for extending the reach of AvaSys to achieve new efficiencies across a wide range of processes within the hospital.”
Another AvaPrize winner is Sunnyview Rehabilitation Hospital, Schenectady, N.Y., one of the nation’s leading rehabilitation hospitals. Sunnyview receives the Path to Zero Award for the most impressive falls reduction program centered on video monitoring. The hospital saw its overall fall rate decline by a statistically significant amount in the first 11 months of deployment of AvaSys. More importantly, it greatly decreased the average fall rate on its highest-risk brain injury unit. Peer-reviewed data on its performance were presented at the 2015 Association of Rehabilitation Nurses Annual Educational Conference.
Where effectively deployed, AvaSys has been shown to nearly eliminate falls on the patients to which it is applied. “When you think of what Sunnyview uses AvaSys for – patients with traumatic brain injuries who are much more likely to fall than other inpatients – this hospital’s success is even more notable,” Playford said.
The final award winner is Beaumont Health, an eight-hospital system in suburban Detroit. The system wins the Hub and Spoke Award for the most efficient use of AvaSys by multi-site organizations using a single remote central observation center. The system has more than 100 mobile units at four of its hospitals, watched by a dedicated team of monitors in its central hub led by a full-time management team. As just one example of the system’s success, Beaumont Hospital-Taylor’s inpatient rehab unit achieved a 51% reduction in falls with injury in 2015. It has also seen a reduction in use of human sitters in patient rooms.
“Having so many units has allowed Beaumont nurses and nursing assistants to focus more on regular patient care,” Playford said. “With more patients under continuous visual monitoring, patients are safer and the hospital system reaps the rewards of efficiency in use of care resources. We envision a day not too far away when the hub and spoke model is commonplace, and remote, centralized video monitoring is an additional patient care safety tactic.”
About AvaSys
AvaSys is a remote patient observation and communications platform that enables a single caregiver to monitor as many as 15 patients at once from a central observation station. These trained observers can vocally intervene with patients – while simultaneously summoning a nurse – long enough to avert harm. AvaSys provides both permanent in-room and mobile audio-visual observation units to many of the nation’s most prestigious and safety-conscious institutions.
