Bedside Association Enabled by Smart Device Connectivity

To support bedside association, customers must provide the Gateway with a list of the EMR locations to which beds can be associated. The location list is loaded into the Digital Health Portal, either manually or by importing the list from a file. Once the location list is loaded, it can be sent to the wireless beds.

Only wireless beds connected to the Gateway receive the location list. The wireless beds use the location list to display location in a hierarchical form on the bed. The caregiver navigates through the menus and location list hierarchy and assigns the bed to a location. The bed to location association is provided back to the Gateway and saved in the system. This becomes the bridge between the bed and the Gateway for passing bed data to other clinical interfaces.

Only one wireless bed can occupy a location at any time. A wireless bed can be associated with an already-occupied location by another wireless bed when the wireless bed provides a force override indication. This will result in a disassociation of the previously located wireless bed. A wireless bed will be denied the location when a wired bed already occupies the location, regardless of whether the wireless bed indicated a forced override scenario.

For beds that support dual mode (wired and wireless), the bed can maintain a connection to the Gateway via both methods, but only to the same location. If a dual mode bed is connected and associated to a location in wireless mode, and gets plugged into a different location, the Gateway will disassociate the wireless connection and the bed will reassociate to the wired connection based on the Smart Device Connectivity location update response.

Wireless beds associated to locations receive information related to the admission, discharge, and transfer of patients in that location. This provides the caregiver with additional information to assist in ensuring that the patient in the bed is the actual patient the ADT system has admitted. Smart Device Connectivity supports three patient verification statuses: Unverified (default), Verified (the caregiver indicated that patient was correct), and Incorrect (the caregiver indicated that the patient was incorrect). The caregiver sets this patient status at the bedside only on wireless devices. When a caregiver indicates that the patient is incorrect, data received from the location is not provided to external clinical interfaces and is used only for display on the Smart Device Connectivity Dashboard with an indication the patient is incorrect.