AUGUST 2019CIOAPPLICATIONS.COM8A Health System's leap to IOT DANIEL MORREALE, SVP & CIO, HUNTERDON HEALTHCARET echnology Fails. I know this, so do you. Somehow, I am always surprised when low-end technology fails, such as a refrigerator. In the case of my organization, it was an expensive failure. The refrigerator of note was one in which we stored vaccines. The failure was a simple one. The unit was left open and there was no automated temperature monitoring to alert the staff. It failed over a weekend, so the problem was not discovered until Monday morning and we lost over $30,000.00 worth of medication and inconvenienced many of our patients. This was the catalyst that started our journey into IoT. We looked at several commercially available temperature alarming solutions and found them to be both expensive, and limited to a single task. Concomitantly, I was speaking with a vendor partner who spoke of some IoT work they were doing with monitoring food carts, and we came upon the idea of exploring if temperature monitoring would be a possible solution for my issue. I really liked this idea, because it opened up an opportunity to not only build out an IoT infrastructure for my organization, but also set the stage for many other possibilities, such as; patient monitoring of vital signs, some real-time location tracking, integrating wearable devices into our care plans, and the potential to transmit patient-specific information to the clinical staff, which would enhance patient safety, provide for even higher quality of care, as well and contribute to improved staff satisfaction when using technology.The challenge, of course, was to find a solution that could support rapid deployment, be in line with our digital strategy, and provide the appropriate cybersecurity healthcare would require. Yes, I had high expectations but believed the effort was worthwhile. We knew we would have to invent the workflow, and "product" and thus sought a partner that would complement the skills we had in-house. We wanted the solution to be cloud-based (I'm trying to make my organization as cloudy as possible), along with being `Network agnostic', built on an infrastructure we can grow with relatively inexpensive sensors, and a reporting counsel (dashboard), which was visually interesting, and IN MY View
< Page 7 | Page 9 >