Summer Blog Series: The Core of Connected Care

Aceso Sphere: Delivering the Promise of Technology to the Patient Room

NOTE: This blog post is the first in a series of brief position papers that will describe the current state of patient-focused technology in the patient room, and how Aceso is delivering solutions to meet the ever-escalating demand for innovation.

How connected patient room technology improves satisfaction, communication, care team capacity, patient safety and throughput.

From a technology perspective, the patient room has historically been slow to implement solutions focused on the patient as a consumer. In the past, a comfortable bed, a TV, a nurse call button, an out-of-date whiteboard, and maybe a window view comprised the patient room strategy. That is changing. As hospitals face tightening margins, workforce shortages, and rising patient expectations, the room itself is becoming a critical component of the care infrastructure — a connected patient room platform can help drive outcomes, efficiency, and impact the patient experience.

Aceso Sphere is an intelligent, open platform built to improve the patient experience, and care delivery. Communication is streamlined, care teams operate more efficiently, and patients and families become part of the care team. The result is a better experience, and better outcomes…for patients and providers.

PATIENT SATISFACTION.  In addition to better outcomes, patient experience carries direct financial weight — HCAHPS scores feed roughly a quarter of a hospital’s Medicare Value-Based Purchasing adjustment. Hospitals using point-of-care surveys and feedback tools on the in-room screen, rather than a phone call weeks after discharge, catch dissatisfaction while it is still fixable; hospitals can impact HCAHPS scores within days of deployment – satisfaction stops being a lagging indicator and becomes something staff can act on during the stay.

PATIENT SAFETY. Falls remain one of the most common, most preventable sources of inpatient harm – and Aceso Sphere can help bridge the gap between awareness and action. Integration with intelligent sensors and bed/chair exit monitoring can flag pre-fall movement up to 30 seconds in advance, while models fed by live EHR data flag a patient whose fall risk has risen mid-stay, not just at admission. Surfacing those signals – and reinforcing awareness to staff and to the patient directly – gives the care team the tools and knowledge needed to intervene before an incident, not just document one after the fact.

COMMUNICATION.  Seamless and real time communication can be an easy first step. Consider an automated whiteboard that is updated as conditions change; automating patient requests via the patient room TV, and providing access to important diagnosis information, goals for the day, or meal ordering, among many other conveniences. Modernizing communication and empowering patients can have an outsized effect on the patient stay. Responses to patient requests can be acted on more quickly – and care teams can focus work at the top of their license. Virtual care and virtual family visits can be initiated with one tap, and valuable time and attention can be delivered when needed.

CARE TEAM EFFICIENCY.  Nurses report spending up 15-20% of a shift on indirect tasks — coordination, requests, chasing down basic needs — rather than direct care. Most of that burden is not clinical: a blanket, ice, a room turned over for the next admission. Aceso Sphere lets patients route routine requests like ice, comfort items, or housekeeping straight to the team responsible for fulfilling them, instead of every request landing in the nurse call queue. Less noise on nurse call means more time at the bedside.

OPERATIONAL EFFICIENCY.  Length of stay is one of the few levers that affects clinical, financial, and capacity outcomes at once — and discharge delay is rarely about the patient being ready; it is about the next step (transport, pharmacy, paperwork, a ride home) not being visible to everyone who needs it. Studies of discharge-readiness tracking show meaningful reductions in length of stay at scale. Aceso Sphere can surface each discharge milestone directly in the room, visible to the patient, family, and every member of the care team, so the whole team works off the same checklist and status. At an average cost of roughly $3,000+ per inpatient day, even modest reductions in length of stay translate into millions of dollars in recovered capacity for a mid-size hospital.

Patient satisfaction, patient safety, communication, care team capacity, and discharge throughput are usually managed as four separate problems, with four separate solutions. They do not have to be. Aceso Sphere treats the patient room as a single connected platform — the last mile to the patient bedside – because the room is where good outcomes start.

Aceso® Interactive Inc.  ·  aceso.com  ·  Sources: NIH National Library of Medicine: Time and Motion Analysis