Background

Hospital Efficiency and the Patient Experience

Many issues have arisen in the hospital that have posed a great challenge to health-care providers, hospital cost structures, and to patients. The figure above displays a brief overview of the four major paint points that hospitals have faced

The process of revamping and adding valuable technology to hospitals that lack the proper infrastructure is a long, expensive process. Typically, hospitals will spend millions of dollars on new equipment in the hopes to provide equal care to all its patients while streamlining the care process. SAMY aims to provide a more economic model for increasing the value of care in the hospitals by providing an integrated system onto which current diagnostic systems can be added. With the portability of SAMY, less capital can be spent on high quantity purchases and instead the system can be moved from room to room and provide patients with access to the same equipment.

Patient flow throughout the hospital is a metric that can add significant strain to the hospital if not properly optimized. From the time when the patient is admitted to the time he is discharged, a patient will generally visit 2-3 health care professionals. Many times the data collected, notes recorded, and questions asked overlap. This redundancy increases time spent on each patient and has affected bed shortages downstream. SAMY intends to centralize the data, giving each new provider access to all data from the patient. Future iterations of the product involve adding a SMART assistant which will further streamline the data.

Low Income hospitals present another target market that SAMY can revolutionize. For those hospitals who may have limited equipment, integrating SAMY into their infrastructure can help these hospital systems overcome the cost burden of buying new devices. Much like the way that SAMY will optimize the patient flow, it will also allow for expensive devices and diagnostics to be shared around the hospital.

As technology has advanced, there has been a growing need to monitor those patients with chronic conditions after they are discharged from the hospital. SAMY provides the infrastructure to move the high tech diagnostics that nurses use to monitor patients vitals in the hospital to the home. Herein, patients could be continuously monitored and would not need to travel to the hospital. This will increase the value of care, better patient outcomes, and hopefully drive down the cost of hospital care.

Designing the SAMY system required a strict process of identifying the functional components and goals that the final embodiment of the device would need to have. Within each goal, the team identified sub goals that would contribute to the functionality and aesthetic of the device. To our team, it was important to identify and establish goals that were achievable as well as "reach" goals that would challenge us throughout the design process.

Structuring the goals in this way helped organize and streamline the design process. From this outline, the team was better able to establish deadlines and critically evaluate design decisions.