Electronic Sitter Management System for Continuous Patient Surveillance
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Solution Overview
Problem
Current patient monitoring systems in healthcare facilities are costly and inefficient, as they require skilled professionals for sitter duties, leading to potential gaps in patient surveillance due to professionals' multitasking and long distances between monitoring stations, and there is a need for a more cost-effective approach to ensure continuous patient monitoring without compromising care quality.
Innovation Solution
An electronic sitter management system that utilizes a network of video cameras transmitting patient room surveillance videos to sitter monitoring devices, allowing for real-time video monitoring and automatic reassignment of patient rooms to available sitters using various rollover policies, ensuring continuous patient surveillance and reducing the workload on skilled professionals.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Reliability
If skilled professionals are used for sitter duties, then patient monitoring quality is improved, but operational costs increase and availability gaps occur due to multitasking
Solution Approach 1:
The patent uses video cameras to create visual copies of patient rooms, transmitting real-time surveillance footage to sitter devices. This allows sitters to monitor multiple patients remotely without physically being present, eliminating the need for skilled professionals to be constantly at patient stations while maintaining monitoring quality.
Solution Approach 2:
The system introduces an intermediary electronic platform that connects video cameras, sitter devices, and notification systems. This intermediary layer enables unskilled sitters to perform monitoring duties effectively by providing them with real-time video feeds and automated alert mechanisms, resolving the contradiction between using skilled professionals and reducing costs.
2Reliability
If skilled professionals perform sitter duties, then patient care quality is maintained, but gaps in surveillance occur due to long distances between monitoring stations
Solution Approach 1:
The patent transitions monitoring from a physical spatial dimension to an electronic digital dimension. Instead of sitters physically moving between patient rooms, the system uses networked video transmission to deliver surveillance feeds to sitters anywhere in the facility, eliminating distance constraints and enabling continuous monitoring without response time gaps.
Solution Approach 2:
The system replaces the mechanical system of physical presence and movement with an electronic video transmission system. Automated alerts and remote video monitoring eliminate the need for sitters to physically respond to each patient, maintaining continuous surveillance while improving response efficiency through automated notification systems.
3Productivity
If multiple patient rooms are assigned to single sitter devices, then resource utilization improves, but workload management complexity increases
Solution Approach 1:
The patent implements dynamic patient assignment that automatically adjusts based on sitter availability and workload. When a sitter becomes unavailable or overloaded, the system dynamically reassigns their patient rooms to other available sitters, optimizing resource utilization while managing complexity through automated rules rather than manual coordination.
Solution Approach 2:
The system incorporates feedback mechanisms that monitor sitter device status, patient room assignments, and alert patterns. This feedback loop enables automated workload balancing, where the system receives information about sitter capacity and automatically redistributes patient assignments to maintain optimal utilization without overwhelming individual sitters.
Data Source
AI summary
An electronic sitter management system coupled to patient surveillance network having a plurality of video cameras, each camera transmitting a stream of surveillance video of a respective patient room. The sitter management system includes at least one sitter management device and a plurality of sitter devices. Each device being assigned a plurality of patient rooms and capable of receiving a plurality of streams of surveillance video for the corresponding plurality of patient rooms and simultaneously displaying a plurality of video images of the corresponding plurality of patient rooms. Each device is also capable of transmitting sitter device availability information to the sitter management device. The sitter management device being capable of recognizing a sitter device being unavailable and reassigning the plurality of patient rooms previously assigned to the unavailable device to other of the plurality of sitter devices that are available.