| Preventable, in-hospital errors account for a substantial number of deaths and injuries in the United States. Various studies estimate that such deaths number between 100,000 and 200,000 each year. One of the key challenges in critical care is a legacy of existing largely wired medical networks, which due to the complexity of their constituent heterogeneous medical devices, limit the ability to optimize the allocation of medical resources such as caregivers. The absence of reliable solutions which address the interoperability of different systems inside critical care units, is principally due to market concerns, since competing vendors do not embrace data sharing standards. In this work, we present a solution that integrates heterogeneous wired legacy systems within a backward compatible wireless interconnect system, providing mobility to caregivers, and the ability to coordinate and optimize their assignment to patients. The design and architecture is able to scale as needed in terms of system load and size. We demonstrate, through simulation, that the system is able to, through the optimization of caregiver assignment, significantly reduce total patient risk within healthcare institutions. A prototype implementation of the system, demonstrates that the system has great promise in real-world field deployments, and can be instrumented to be compliant with site security requirements and the HIPAA privacy act. |
