How RoomMate's activity overview increases patient safety

With the «activity overview» function in the safety sensor RoomMate, care workers can more easily map the behaviour and daily activities of residents they care for and better understand the resident’s needs. This enables a person centred service, which increases the quality of care and overall resident safety as well as providing a safer day to day life for those living in care services.

Sensio provides welfare technology for resident safety, which gives healthcare workers opportunities to work «digitally first». With the help of this digital first mind set, urgent needs can be quickly met and planned supervision of residents and patients in, for example, care homes can be made more efficient.

It has been documented that the ground-breaking safety sensor RoomMate provides major gains in dementia and elderly care compared to traditional nurse call systems. Some of the benefits are increased safety and security, a reduction in the number of falls and faster response times for residents and patients, as well as a simpler and more efficient everyday working life for the employees.

Individual measures

Healthcare teams spend time observing and mapping resident behaviour in order to create effective care plans. And to ensure that a care plan is effectively meeting the needs of a residents or patient they must also have insight into the effect of the treatment measures the care plan ascribes. In order to understand patient needs and patient behaviour, the measures and services must also be continually adapted, and it can be difficult and time-consuming to record enough observations to achieve this.

– A few years ago, we discovered in Sensio that some customers with RoomMate systematically analysed the alarm logs with the aim of linking patient needs or risk behaviour to which alarms went off at which time of the day. This discovery led to a new feature in RoomMate that we have called «activity overview», says product manager Jon Slorer at Sensio.

Creates a 24-hour overview of the behaviour

The primary function of RoomMate is digital supervision where the alarm is triggered when the sensor, for example, recognises that the resident or patient falls, is active in the room, gets out of bed or stays in bed too long. RoomMate is then used to transmit images or sound to allow care teams to determine whether the patient or resident needs help. The «activity overview» feature takes advantage of the fact that the sensor can be instructed to save what it «sees» every three seconds and is a way to graphically visualise RoomMate events on a 24-hour timeline in an easy-to-use report format.

This provides a 24-hour picture of the patient's behaviour in the room, and this overview is an important tool for improving the quality of the service, which has yielded major gains in the form of reduced risk for the patients. «In short, you go straight from data to decisions and measures», explains Slorer.

Example from a patient in a nursing home who got up in bed a lot during the night and turned out to be in a lot of pain.

Identifies and maps patient needs

In total, our clients have analysed over 6,000 activity reports from RoomMate, and based on interviews with these customers, Sensio has gained insight into how this overview is used. The typical use is related to insight into patient behaviour to look at sleep patterns, management of patients at risk of falls, or as a way to identify problems that have not yet been discovered.

By analysing the activity overview, care teams can easily «see» things that are very difficult to observe, for example during the night shift – such as awakenings, visits to the toilet, how long one actually lies in bed or that the resident was active when they were not expected to be and perhaps fell.

– As a result of the insight in the activity overview, customers have discovered urinary tract infections, dehydration, poor response to medication, inactivity and several serious conditions, says Jon Slorer.

«In our ward, the activity chart has become part of the daily routine. Nurses look at the overview daily, and others quickly check-up when we see deviations.»

A care home in one of the municipalities in Norway that has actively adopted the activity chart concluded: «In our ward, the activity chart has become part of the daily routine. Nurses look at the overview daily, and others quickly check-up when we see deviations.»

Increases patient safety

For Sensio, it is interesting that our technology has been used in this way, contributing to solving a core daily task such as the identification and mapping of an individual’s needs. What began as an innovative use case has helped enable better quality care and at the same time increase patient safety.

– Although the activity overview is limited in that it only shows the last 24 hours and neither the behaviour picture nor the observations can be saved, the users of the activity overview have been very clear that mapping patient behaviour in this way is incredibly valuable, precisely because it is difficult to do it yourself, says Slorer.

As a default setting, the activity overview in RoomMate is not activated, and the function can be switched on and off down to resident level, so that it can be used when needed. The report from the activity overview must be retrieved explicitly and is only available to members of the care team who are actively caring for an individual.

– Ahead of using this feature, our customers make a considered assessment based on each resident’s risk profile. Prior consent is always obtained or if this isn’t possible a Depravation of Liberty Safeguarding assessment is completed, concludes Jon Slorer.

Do you want to know more?

In this article, you have read about how care teams can more easily map patient behaviour and better understand the patient's needs using the activity overview in RoomMate. The benefit is an individually adapted service, which increases patient safety and provides a safer everyday life for patients and residents.

Do you want to know more about the activity overview in RoomMate? Feel free to contact us for free advice.