Planar Touch Screen Monitors Help Children's Hospital Monitor Risk

The Clinical Logistics Center (CLC) at Nemours Children's Hospital looks like something out of a NASA mission control operation. But instead of tracking satellites, there is another very important mission at stake: monitoring patients' lives. Nemours has two children's hospitals—Alfred I. duPont in Wilmington, Delaware, and the Nemours Children's Hospital in Orlando, Florida—and professionals in the CLC can monitor hundreds of patient beds at both locations. Working with real-time patient data feeds, the CLC system prioritizes risk, issues alerts on display monitors and even allows for remote intervention, if necessary.

Representative of the rapidly expanding field of medical informatics, the CLC takes a continuous stream of data and turns it into actionable knowledge, said Dr. David West, Medical Director of Health Informatics at Nemours.

"The key value is in the ability to utilize data for making an impact in terms of care. We can detect in a data set if something is wrong and take immediate steps to respond," he said.

The CLC is supported with a total of 24 Planar touch screen monitors (Planar® PXL2430MW). Optimized for multimedia applications, the 24-inch widescreen displays are an integral component to the CLC infrastructure, allowing a dedicated team to monitor patients around the clock.

"It's important to understand that each patient bed represents a continuous stream of information, not only in regard to vital signs and monitoring data but all the various routine patient measurements and inputs that nurses and other ancillary staff make on an ongoing basis," Dr. West said. "The CLC turns this continual flow of data into usable information."

Optimized for visual cues

With so much information streaming in, it's essential that the CLC system can efficiently categorize and communicate meaningful data in both a seamless and logical way.

"Nobody can follow hundreds of streaming data sets, so the trick with the technology—and by extension the monitors—is to be able to accurately draw the eye to key parameters that are most critical or need immediate attention," Dr. West said.

This is accomplished through color-coding, positional sorting and intelligent organization of content through the Planar PXL Series monitors. "The display is dynamic and will adjust as a child's condition changes or as the situation changes," Dr. West said. "Data is visually streamlined to eliminate complexity."

The need for a reliable solution

For incorporating a touch screen monitor technology with the CLC, reliability was a major priority in making a determination. "A touch screen was identified as a requisite best use for reasons related to usability and speed in accessing data, and since these monitors would be in operation 24 hours a day and getting heavy use, we needed something that was unquestionably durable," said Collin McQueen, senior telehealth coordinator at Nemours.

Part of Nemours's decision to use the Planar PXL Series was based on their past success with Planar displays. "We already have Planar monitors deployed throughout the hospital and they've been very dependable," McQueen said. "There was no hesitation in staying within the Planar family of monitors. I'm happy to say we made the right choice."