It’s a bit ironic that health IT companies try to improve patient safety and solve problems like alarm fatigue by developing another alert system. But Ristcall hopes to avoid that by creating a set of wearables for nurses and inpatients that allow them to communicate with each using the hospital’s Wi-Fi network.
Ristcall, which is part of DreamIt Health’s third accelerator class, developed the wearables so communication could flow two ways. The idea is patients can alert nurses more easily and nurses can more readily respond and time stamp when patients alerted them.
It’s a good idea to keep things simple and Ristcall does. Although it encourages patients to provide feedback from patients on the quality of each response to the alerts they trigger, they just press a thumbs up or thumbs down icon. Nurses have more work to do on their side but hopefully the touchscreens are sensitive enough that they don’t need a stylus.
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The devices could also add more context to patient satisfaction scores that can impact hospitals’ reimbursement. Ristcall is the first technology coming out of Avayayah Technologies from Pittsburgh.
Mobile health solutions focusing on communication are of particular interest for hospitals. Healthcare professionals are tired of using pagers and shouldn’t be using text messaging to share information about patients with colleagues to be HIPAA compliant. Seratis, another DreamIt Health grad, launched a platform so that members of a patient’s care team can see who has done what for the patient to make handoffs and shift changes easier. Among some of the other companies in this space are TigerText, Practice Unite, Voalte, and Cureatr.
Among DreamIt Health’s partners are Independence Blue Cross and Penn Medicine.