Cerner Demonstrates The Hospital Room Of The Not-So-Distant Future At HIMSS 2007

Kansas City, MO. - Picture yourself checking into the hospital and your room has one monitor that is connected to all your care providers. Imagine having no confusing paper chart but instead seeing your medical records and general health information all at the click of a mouse. Visualize the idea of bringing together all of your favorite electronic comforts of home right to your bedside – TV, movies on demand, video games and more. The hospital room of the future is not that far off. At Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) 2007 in New Orleans, Cerner showcased the "Smart Room," powered by the CareAware architecture - the integration of multiple devices with the Electronic Medical Record (EMR). The Smart Room is the next generation of "Smart Care," where the patient is the central focus.

"We feel this is a natural development in building the Hospital of the Future," said Bill Miller, Cerner vice president. "Cerner's CareAware device connectivity architecture allows for the automation of the healthcare system, ultimately delivering a greater level of patient safety, increased efficiency and patient experience."

The Smart Room is the intersection of a variety of innovative technologies including radio frequency identification (RFID), patient beds, medical bedside device, patient communication, information and entertainment. The room was designed with the patient in mind, but nearly every hospital role gains significant benefit from this Smart Room.

• As a patient, you want to be informed about your condition and would enjoy some creature comforts of home too. The Smart Room has an interactive TV system, which combines popular off-the-shelf hardware components and custom-developed applications that provide comprehensive communication, education and entertainment for the patient and their families. By bringing all the comforts of home right to the bedside, a patient's overall experience is improved. Cerner is utilizing its partnership with innovative technology companies as well as existing client investment in the Cerner Millennium architecture to provide a comprehensive patient solution that can be easily operated by all patients.
• If you are a physician that has multiple patients in different locations, monitoring their progress can be a challenge. Even with the high demands of a critical care suite, the Smart Room allows care providers to create remote intensive care unit (ICU) access using video/audio conferencing technology to support quality audio and video images. Two-way communication into each patient's room, along with high-resolution video and audio, provides the remote site with real time "eyes and ears." Cerner's virtual solution allows a physician to monitor multiple patients from multiple hospitals.
• From housekeeping to clinicians, hospital staff is constantly coming in and out of patient rooms and require different patient information to perform their job. The "dashboard" securely displays up-to-date and accurate information that is needed by authorized care providers treating the patient at the bedside. Today, if you are a nurse or physician working in the hospital setting, it is essential for you to have access to patient information when you need it regardless of where you are.

To address this need, Cerner is working with industry leading tablet and PDA manufacturers to enhance Cerner Millennium on different form factors while allowing these devices to communicate on the CareAware medical device architecture in real time.

The Smart Room is powered by the CareAware architecture, which was built on more than 25 years of experience in healthcare automation. Cerner created the CareAware global device architecture to bridge the gap between medical devices and patient information, allowing healthcare organizations to:

• Connect the provider community to medical devices to eliminate errors and improve effectiveness
• Connect the devices to the clinician workflow to improve outcomes
• Connect device information to the EMR to provide one source of truth

Cerner's scalable enterprise approach to device connectivity offers plug-and-play capability for medical devices and can be used with Cerner Millennium solutions as well as other systems.Regardless of your role in the healthcare system, whether you are a patient, a physician, a nurse or part of the support team, the hospital room will never be the same again.

SOURCE: Cerner Corp