Proposed AI Medical Device that would log all actions in a hospital room.

They say that the best use cases for new technology comes from real life experiences.

Well, I would like to share what happened recently that really put my mind to work and thinking there has to be a better way.

My wife was in the hospital for a total of 9 days recently.

3 days in local smaller town hospital and then she was transferred to a larger city hospital for 6 additional days of care. I will not share which specific hospitals, simply because it doesn’t matter for this article.

She was transferred from the local hospital to the larger hospital because she continued to get worse, and the doctors simply felt that due to her particular condition and there lack of positive diagnoses she could be better served at a larger and more well equipped facility.

So, a little back history on my wife’s condition. She had an elective outpatient surgery 5 days prior to being admitted into the first hospital.

Her first symptom was a VERY high fever, 105 degrees to be exact. I frantically admitted her to the local small town hospital, where they quickly and incorrectly diagnosed her with a post surgical site staph or streptococcal infection.

I stayed by my wife’s side 24/7 though out the entire 9 days (both hospitals) and helped see to her recovery from start to finish. During our extended stay in the hospital I closely observed the many inefficiencies, mistakes, errors and problems that goes along with being in a modern day hospital facility.

Even with the latest technologies in both hospitals, I noticed the lack of communication between the nurses, nursing assistants, nurse practitioner, internal doctor, surgeon, wound care specialist and all the other folks which was assigned to my wife’s case.

Every person that entered my wife’s room manually logged items and medications in a computer terminal which was mounted on the wall. A bar code scanner and/or keyboard was used to input what medications my wife was being administered.

THE PROBLEMS I NOTICED

1. The doctors and nurses had to manually keyboard in information and change orders on my wife.
2. Several times I had to update the oncoming floor nurse on my wife’s current status, because the outgoing nurse had not provided a good shift change.
3. Food delivery to my wife’s room was a manual task were someone had to be called or a person came by the room to ask my wife what she wanted for breakfast, lunch and dinner.
4. Communication between the many doctors my wife had on her case was very fragmented. They used group texting to communicate with each other. One of the doctors basically refused to communicate with the others and simply was doing his own thing without any communication with the others on the team.
5. At the first hospital, they pulled swabs and attempted to grow lab cultures to try and determine the type of potential bacterial growth. When we arrived at the second hospital, they had no access to the lab results from the first hospital. Therefore a second set of cultures had to be pulled at the second hospital, these cultures took an additional 48 to 72 hours to grow. This wasted not only money, but a huge amount of time, because of the lack of data sharing between the two hospitals.
6. The nurses had to manually log in each prescription my wife was on at the second hospital, because of the in-ability of electronic communication from the 1st hospital. Since the information was manually inputted, the possibility of making a human mistake goes up.
7. It was the same situation with the doctors from hospital 1 to hospital 2. No communication whatsoever. Basically the doctors at hospital 2 was forced to start completely over on attempting to diagnose my wife.
8. My wife’s diagnosis turned out to be a very rare auto immune response called “postoperative pyoderma gangrenosum” Roughly 3–6 people out of 1,000,000 get this after surgery. Thank goodness it was easily fixable with a specific type steroid. The problem is there is nothing in place for medical professionals to automatically share rare case findings like my wife’s with the rest of the world. All classification of rare findings have to be shared manually and the process is very fragmented.

THE SOLUTION

Look at the attached image above. This medical device would stay in the patients room at all times. It would be an IPad looking device mounted on a portable stand that will use cloud based artificial intelligence to be there by the patients side 24/7.

Upon entering the hospital each new patient will be assigned his or her personal AI medical Assistant. The main purpose of the AI assistant is for it to be able to act as an around the clock monitor, information and data logger.

The device will provide each new patient it is assigned to a completely unique public account number on the decentralized public network powered by Hedera Hashgraph. Each time a person enters a hospital a new public account number will be issued for that instance.

This (blockchain type) distributed ledger technology (DLT) will act as the trust layer for the patient and will provide a completely anonymous and HIPAA compliant environment where patient data and information can be logged, stored and shared freely not only among the local hospital staff, but data from each (patient) public account number can be safely and anonymously mined for statistics and other analytical benefits.

Some examples of how this cloud based AI and Hedera Hashgraph powered medical assistant device could solve the problems my wife and I recently experienced in our local hospitals.

1. The AI assistant will have a flip over plastic cover attached to the top of the device. It can be covered up for privacy. When the cover is open, the AI will be actively listening, logging, transcribing and storing doctors, nurses comments, notes, lab results and other information that is relevant to the patients care.
2. The AI assistant will monitor and track the patients current vitals signs using wireless monitor technologies currently in the marketplace. The old vital signs monitor device seen in most hospital rooms today will become obsolete and the new AI and Hedera assistant will take the physical place of these old and dumb monitors. The AI will be able to recognize when the patients vital signs are a concern and will able to alert a nurse of a problem.
3. Doctors will have remote access to the AI assistant where they can privately monitor the patient, make notes and/or log information about their patient medications, lab results, etc.
4. The AI device could update and provide the oncoming floor nurse with all the latest information that is logged during the prior shift.
5. The AI would be programed to ask the patient what they might like for their next meal, this information would then be sent to the hospital cafeteria workers automatically. Of course the AI would need to be smart enough to be able to determine if the patient is awake, asleep, unconscious at all times.
6. Moving from one hospital to another or even from one doctor to another would be a breeze because with all the patients data and information being logged onto a public decentralized ledger, information can be shared freely and while still maintaining privacy and complete HIPAA compliance. The new doctor or the new hospital would simply need to know the patients public account number to access the patients medical information.
7. Again with the patients medications and lab results being on the public ledger, moving from one hospital to another should be flawless, the new hospital would only need to know the anonymous public account number of the patient.
8. With all patient diagnoses being logged onto a distributed public ledger, rare cases of diseases such as my wife’s could be easily compared and tracked both statistically and geographically.

In summary, this new AI and Hedera Hashgraph powered medical device would solve a lot (not all) of the current problems I have recently seen and experienced first hand in the modern day hospital.

I am not the person to build this AI device. I am the person that hopefully (through this article) will motivate the right person to recognize that this device needs to built.