CloudPulse

Inspiration

The NYP ED's iLAB meets SmartHeart to form CloudPulse! Our collaboration is dedicated to improving patient care through enhancing the health tech user-experience. The CloudPulse team set out to untangle wires and make EKG acquisition and transmission a seamless part ED workflow.

While ED's across the world perform EKGs within minutes (if not seconds) of a patient's arrival to the ER, a physician needs to view it to make a critical triage decision: is the patient stable enough to stay in triage or do they need to go immediately to an acute care area? In a bustling ED, finding an attending physician can take up valuable time, while a patient may be actively having a cardiac event. Currently, a tech typically roams the ED looking for the assigned doctor to read the EKG, comment on it, and convey the information back to the triage nurse, as precious minutes tick by.

SmartHeart has developed a bluetooth enabled portable wireless FDA cleared EKG device that not only acquires the EKG but also uploads it instantly to a physician portal. In collaboration with iLAB, this technology is going to untether triage EKGs from the tangle of wires and transform the speed and ease with which physicians interact and notify each other of critical cardiac patients.

How it works

Strap the SmartHeart device to the patient's chest and bingo, you are ready to beam. The wireless device will instantly transmit the 12 lead EKG to the customized portal, that can be accessed anywhere in the ED.

The administrative attending is alerted to an incoming EKG on their iPad for instant annotation. The doctor can choose to flag the EKG "Green" (stay in triage) or "Red" (go stat to ED). The triage nurse will immediately see this information on their iPad screen and be able to transfer a critical cardiac patient to an acute care area in seconds. Not only can this decision be made without a tech having to run around the ER, but the most useful feature of CloudPulse is that the EKG is automatically uploaded to the patient's Eclipsys record! No more lost EKGs. No wasted time. No missing data. No EKG hunts. EVER.

As soon as a patient is assigned to an area of the ED, the EKG becomes instantly viewable by any provider with access to the CloudPulse portal for that area, including any comments made by the administrative attending. Any EKG can then be compared to an old one, all on one easy to view screen. Every EKG will be stored in the patient's record forever.

CloudPulse will ensure that every EKG is instantly reviewed, annotated, and filed. Always.

Challenges I ran into

Curbing our enthusiasm to replace the current process in the ED with CloudPulse already! But really, we have been incredibly excited and inspired by this collaboration. The only challenges are in custom tailoring an existing platform to meet our specific needs, but this has proven to be no problem for a very talented team.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

iLAB's ability to get to the bottom of process glitches by careful study of user behavior, user interface, and user-experience.

SmartHeart's ability to quickly understand our needs, be nimble and customize their existing physician portal to meet our requirements.

How we together we have been able to unite iLab's clinical and operational expertise with SmartHeart's technical prowess to develop a customized and tailored EKG solution for the Cornell ED.

What I learned

The techs, nurses, and physicians involved in EKG acquisition, review, filing, and retrieval knew what solution would work best for them. A nimble mobile smart health tech company with its ears on the ground was the critical boost we needed to put our ideas into action. This grassroots effort was the ultimate catalyst in enabling wireless, smart, and mobile technology to revolutionize emergency care delivery. It is exciting to be part of this change.

What's next for CloudPulse

We hope to win InnovateNYP! We will use the support to pilot this system in our triage area in parallel with the existing process to study its strengths, gaps, and map the road to scaling up.