Nuvon Chief Informatics Officer John Zaleski likes to explain what his company does by referring to his time working on his PhD. At that time, he and other academics in the 1970s and 1980s were thinking up ways health IT could improve patient outcomes. This work became the building blocks of today’s medical informatics.
Fast forward 30 years to the present: companies can now offer hospitals ways to implement these ideas. And hospitals are ready for it. Nuvon has FDA clearance for a software platform and a new component of that system. One, called VEGA, is a device data capture platform that integrates with health information systems. It was cleared in 2010. The other, cleared this year, is for its VITALS charting system that’s an informatics component of VEGA.
Nuvon started out as a technology and engineering company focused on connectivity between medical devices and electronic health records through a library of device drivers. The Affordable Care Act has made its capabilities very relevant, very quickly. It has evolved into a clinical informatics company, with tools that can capture and meaningfully use patient data to improve decision making.
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“The use of technology to keep people healthy compared with using it to treat people who are sick is highly transformational,” said CEO Christopher Gatti in a phone interview with MedCity News. Also on the call were Jeanne Venella, a clinical practice specialist who is a former pediatric and adult emergency room nurse with 30 years’ experience and Zaleski.
One of the emerging trends the company is seeing has to do with syndromic surveillance. RFPs from hospitals are searching for better ways to identify patients that share similar symptoms indicating a disease pattern. This is an approach to evaluating patient data for signs of a disease outbreak. In the future it sees an important role for its technology to do remote monitoring of patients from home.
Although it works with hospitals in several different ways, here are some examples of how its technology is being used.
Contextualized data The timetable for analyzing patient data is shifting. Instead of postmortems that look for clues that led up to adverse events, hospitals can set criteria that can pick up subtle changes that would lead to the risk of an adverse event way ahead of time. One client is working with the company to develop early warning signs in the operating room.
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Alarm fatigue-free alerts to physicians, nurses With patient-controlled analgesics, it’s critical that the devices are monitored in real time in case the patient’s use of the pain medication pump exceeds pre-set limits. Same with devices to monitor carbon dioxide in the blood. These are a couple of examples of data that can be monitored in real time. If levels are approaching the pre-set limits, an alert can be transmitted automatically to care teams who can intervene before something happens. The alerts can be communicated through email or a dashboard to avoid alarm fatigue. “We are taking a different approach,” said Gatti. “Before the storm arrives, let’s assess whether there is a storm on the horizon or if there is nothing there.”
Managing nurse workflows Venella said nurses spend 35 percent of their day charting patient medical records. One problem is bad charting. That’s when nurses try to enter data at the end of their shift based on their recollection of the past eight hours. She noted that a lot of healthcare systems are encouraging staff to do charting at the bedside. Using its charting solution, department wide or individual criteria can be used to set notification based on physiologic monitoring or other device parameters. It can help alert nurses to sepsis warning signs as well as temperature changes. By providing real documentation it can give bedside nurses some teeth, Venella said.
Biomedical device drivers Nuvon has a library of medical device drivers that can be used to help capture data from medical devices and transmit it to EMRs. It’s working with a children’s hospital in the Mid-Atlantic region to update its inventory of 10,000 medical devices. Driver updates can be written and remotely distributed to connected devices. It claims it can do this seamlessly to reduce support costs and downtime.
