Surveying Fall Prevention Innovation: Fall Prevention Week 2022
This National Fall Prevention Awareness Week, we wanted to hear from the acute healthcare community on fall prevention trends. After the results were tallied, it’s clear to say that patient safety is front-of-mind for hospitals and hospital systems. But organizations aren’t resigned to the same old solutions. The desire to explore innovation in patient safety has never been stronger.
Changing patient acuity and burned-out nurse teams were the top cited reasons for increased falls in the last year, especially as organizations grapple with an influx of older adult patients and the shortage of nurses. So, it’s no surprise that when organizations look for innovative solutions, they want tools that will work with their teams, reduce alarm fatigue, and prevent wasted time. Fall prevention tools must integrate seamlessly from day one, instead of becoming an additional task list for care teams.
Only 25% of organizations surveyed reported seeing their fall rates drop over the last 12 months, a statistic that only further supports the need to adopt new strategies for patient safety. Perhaps this challenging trend is kickstarting urgency to adopt technology over traditional solutions like increased rounding, in-room sitters, and pressure alarms. With technological options using AI, machine learning, and other modern developments, the solutions aren’t just passive tools but become active partners for the teams using them.
When asked what lead to improvement in their fall numbers, one healthcare leader responded,
“Tracking data that lead to falls and reviewing it with staff. [That data] increased awareness and attention.”
With the rise of nursing informatics in healthcare, solutions need to not only work from reliable data, but also record and provide data to the teams using them. And data is only getting more and more valuable as technology becomes integrated not just with healthcare, but the daily lives of doctors, nurses, and patients alike. Being able to track, analyze, and review events is vital to creating a better system the first time, instead of running through several process changes. It can also allow coaching to be focused and specific for individual team members.
A Modern Solution to Fall Prevention
VSTOne is a fall prevention solution that uses artificial intelligence to become unlike any other system on the market. The highly accurate AI can detect a patient’s intention to stand, allowing care teams to attend to patients before they have exited their bed or chair, creating proactive fall prevention without increasing staffing. By placing VSTOne in patient rooms, hospitals can achieve 24/7 fall monitoring without the high cost of in-room or telesitters and support their teams to focus on patient care.