Yale New Haven Health System (YNHHS), New Haven, Conn, is using a newly developed ventilator surveillance system for patients with COVID-19 who are undergoing mechanical ventilation. The Ventilated Patient Surveillance (VPS) workstation, from Capsule Technologies, was developed by YNHHS and Capsule based on Capsule’s existing Remote Surveillance application.
Launched at YNHHS, the Capsule VPS workstation analyzes streaming live data from ventilators, which are not ordinarily connected for surveillance, and escalates emergent clinically actionable events to respiratory therapists, pulmonologists and intensivists. The added surveillance capability complements the health system’s established InSight Tele-ICU program, which has employed Capsule’s Remote Surveillance solution for many years.
“While developing the VPS workstation, we expected it to provide caregivers additional eyes on their patients for delivering timely interventions,” said Hemant Goel, chief executive officer of Capsule Technologies. “We realized, soon after deploying these at Yale, that the VPS workstation delivered additional benefits, such as protecting caregivers from unnecessary exposure to infection and reducing the use of personal protective equipment (PPE). Yale New Haven is among the first hospitals to deploy the solution, maintaining a high standard of care for today’s coronavirus patients, while establishing a higher standard through extended device connectivity.”
Due to the risk of infection, YNHHS patient room doors remain closed, and entering and exiting patient areas takes more time than usual for donning and doffing PPE. With a limited number of Respiratory Therapists (RTs) to cover all ventilators, the VPS workstation helps staff determine a clinically advantageous time to go into patient areas and provide care. It also enables RTs outside the room to guide less experienced care team members at the bedside.
YNHHS has transformed many non-ICU patient rooms into temporary ICU rooms, creating negative pressure environments to mitigate infection spread. Many of these rooms are isolated and do not have windows into accessways, so ventilators and bedside medical devices are not visible, and alarms are not easily heard. The VPS workstation helps staff remotely see and hear the ventilators in these non-traditional ICU settings. The system’s smart rules highlight clinically actionable emergent events, enabling care providers to formulate an effective response. Overall, YNHHS believes that they are achieving superior patient outcomes for COVID-19 ventilated patients compared to most other reported data from hospitals in the U.S.
“Our collaboration with Capsule Technologies is an extension of our existing partnership and our own long-held vision for using technology to manage critically ill patients through remote access, analytics and smart notifications,” said Chris Gutmann, system director, Information Technology and Clinical Engineering at YNHHS. “This ventilated patient surveillance solution is not only helping our care teams confront the COVID-19 pandemic today, but I expect it will continue to serve the needs of our clinicians and patients well into the future, becoming a standard of care.”
Ventilated patient surveillance leverages the ventilator connectivity of the Capsule Medical Device Information Platform, used in more than 2,000 U.S. hospitals. Capsule is offering the VPS workstation to its customers in the U.S., where Capsule Surveillance has FDA clearance. To reduce the financial burden on hospitals, the company provides all necessary software licenses for the VPS workstation at no charge to all eligible clients for an initial period of at least six months and potentially longer if the pandemic persists.
