SubscribeWith advanced video surveillance, Norway’s leading hospital for epilepsy gives much better service to its patients. The institution is able to reduce length of stay and improve diagnoses with a new network camera solution.
After many years with old equipment, the special hospital for epiliepsy in Norway, called Rikshospitalets Spesialsykehuset for Epilepsi (SSE), can proudly demonstrate a new and modern network IT system for monitoring their patients. The solution is based on software from Milestone Systems, operating networked cameras connected to a video server that can be operated by the personnel of the hospital departments on a standard PC. Every bed is monitored by directionally controlled cameras. In total, they have data transmission equivalent to 57 floppy disks per second, around the clock, 365 days a year.
"Previously we had only four cameras at each of the four children's and adult's wards. This meant we had to move the patients who needed to be watched more carefully to one of the rooms with a camera. This became a complicated and resource-heavy process," says the department nurse Stein Atle Roestad.Many people coming to the hospital are there for diagnosis. In such a process, proper document-ation is all-important. With the new surveillance system, the job has become much easier.
"One of our main tasks is to document and classify the patients' epilepsy attacks. It is important that we follow the progress and tempo as well as what actually happens during the attack itself," explains Roestad. "Our priority focus was to replace and upgrade the old surveillance possibilities to record and study the incidences better."
Warnings give better care
The network camera images stream into the Milestone software, which is scheduled to give alerts based on motion detection. This warning when unusual movement starts gets a nurse's attention so they do not have to watch the system all the time.
"Many of the patients we have here for diagnosis come to get confirmation whether they really do have epilepsy. A traditional video surveillance system covering 16 patients with one machine would only give a picture every 18 seconds. This is way too low resolution for any photo quality of value and gives no possibility to zoom in for more detail, like we now can with the new cameras."
"We envision many advantages in using the system, but initially use it only to monitor and study incidences, and archive them in the database for analysis," says the department nurse.
A great deal of the potential lies in the archiving, as it is then possible to easily search and find again any part of the process of an attack, and compare it to others. Such clear documentation ensures better quality of the diagnostic process. Among other things, it can help in differentiating the various attacks more easily from each other, i.e. epileptic versus psychologically-related incidences.
PC controlled solution
Everything in the new system is controlled from a computer running on Microsoft Windows and with the Milestone software installed. Nurse Stein Atle Roestad says the nurses can easily control the cameras in the different rooms from a standard PC.
"It is a big help and reduces the length of time for the patients' stays: these become shorter and more effective to the advantage of both the patients and the hospital. But more importantly, we get a higher quality of diagnosis and documentation. We also explain to the patients how the cameras work so everyone knows they are being monitored. They can ask us to turn off the cameras when they have a spouse visiting or when they are changing clothes, for example."
The hospital personnel point out that there are many patients who do not need to be monitored for medical reasons; only about one-fourth of the patients require it. Out of a total length of stay that takes about two or three weeks, only a few of those days require use of the surveillance system. The normal length of stay for a patient is 17 days.
"We see that the surveillance can help reduce a patient's length of stay. When we started this implementation, it was important that we took into account coordination with the medical technical equipment, too. In the future, because the system is software-based, we will be able to integrate the surveillance with sound, images and the medical data without having to move a patient to a special unit. It also opens up the possibility for two-way communication between the patients and the personnel," states Roestad.
Option to connect with PDAs
The supplier and the hospital boast about other future possibilities like viewing the surveillance images with a PDA. Doctors could see a patient's movements live in real-time or view the recordings of them afterwards, from their offices or anywhere in the building.
"The requirements for medical documentation have become much stricter in recent years. It is important that patients are handled in the right way. Patients come here who have been diagnosed for epilepsy at other hospitals, where we can see the diagnoses do not agree. The new surveillance system increases the patients' trust in getting the right diagnosis," says Roestad.
The surveillance system itself operates in a closed network of its own that is not connected to the internet or the rest of the building's IT system. This has been done to help ensure the patients' privacy and confidentiality.
"Even though we are initially only using a small portion of the functionality that is possible with the system, we can see that it will be an invaluable tool for us in the future. As just one of the hospitals under the entire national hospital system, we are very thankful to have been prioritized with this investment. We would also like to point out that it is not meant to be a tool for reducing the number of personnel - it is for improving the quality of the service we deliver to the patients," concludes nurse Stein Atle Roestad.
