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A touchscreen monitor located near the patient’s bed automatically display’s a "HIPAA screen" with basic patient safety related info, including patient name, allergies, and precautions such as patient being at risk for falls, said Sharbaugh. The monitor also displays the identity of the healthcare worker for the patient to view.
With a push of a button on the tag, additional patient information based on the tag wearer’s role is displayed on the screen.
So, while a hospital food worker delivering a meal tray will see the patient’s dietary information and known food allergies, a nurse assigned to care for the patient will see additional real-time information pulled from the patient’s e-health record, such as test results, medications that are due, and tasks that need to be preformed, such as the changing of a catheter or bandage. Doctors see information relevant to their role with the patient.
The data displayed also allows clinicians to find, collect and enter information more easily, such as patients’ vital signs.
UPMC simulation lab testing on SmartRoom found that use of the technology can save nurses 60% to 80% of the time they normally spend documenting routine patient information such as vital signs, said Michael Boroch, SmartRoom CEO, who was previously a healthcare consultant and an executive at IBM Healthcare.
UPMC decided to use Sonitor ultrasound technology rather than RFID for the location-based system because "ultrasound is very good at defining where the tag is within a couple feet," said Sharbaugh, who was previously a senior director in UPMC’s Center for Quality Improvement and Innovation.
The ultrasound technology provides "sub-room accuracy," said Boroch.
"We want the SmartRoom caregiver screen to only turn on when the caregiver is in the room near the patient, not waking by the room, for example," he said.
"The same is true for leaving the room, we want the caregiver screen to know it’s time to shut down."
This is also important when there are more than one patient in the room. In a semi-private room, the tag "knows where the caregiver is and opens only that caregiver screen," Boroch said.
"Some RFID technologies will detect things right through a wall and that does not work for us," he said.
UPMC has used the SmartRoom technology in patient units of about two dozen beds each at two of its UPMC Shadyside and Montefiore facilities. However the plan is roll out SmartRoom at UPMC’s other hospitals, especially medical-surgical units.
SmartRoom "is like Garmin for caregivers at the bedside," said Boroch.
While UPMC uses Cerner e-medical record systems in its inpatient settings, SmartRoom will be available to hospitals regardless of the vendor platform used for their clinical information system, said Sharbaugh.
IBM will provide the services and technology to integrate SmartRoom with those hospitals’ e-medical records and other clinical information systems, said Boroch.
IBM and University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, which are in the midst of an 8-year relationship to transform UPMC’s IT infrastructure, have unveiled a new joint effort to make hospital rooms nationwide "smarter."
The two companies have formed a new business relationship to offer to non-UPMC hospitals SmartRoom technology that was developed by UPMC.
Under the deal, both IBM and UPMC will invest in the new SmartRoom company through a $50 million co-development fund set up in 2005 when IBM and UPMC entered an 8-year relationship to "transform" UPMC’s IT infrastructure, which includes ambitious projects such as consolidating and virtualizing UPMC’s IT environment.
While UPMC officials won’t disclose how much money has been invested into SmartRoom so far, the funding is the largest investment from the joint IBM/UPMC fund to date.
Under the pact, the SmartRoom subsidiary is wholly owned by UPMC but IBM will be the exclusive sales channel, offering SmartRoom configurations, integration and related services to non-UPMC hospital customers nationwide for their facilities.
SmartRoom, which is based on a services-oriented architecture, has been tested and used so far in patient units at two of UPMC’s 20 hospitals, UPMC ShadySide and UPMC Montefiore in Pittsburgh.
The SmartRoom location-based system, which has been under development at UPMC for the last four years, automatically provides nurses, doctors and other pertinent hospital workers wearing small ultrasound tags with real-time patient information relevant to the staffer’s role with a patient when approaching the patient’s bed in a hospital room.
The SmartRoom technology also automatically organizes and prioritizes tasks clinicians need to provide to the individual patient.
IBM will offer hospital customers with "its expertise with different [e-health record systems] vendors in integrating" the SmartRoom technology with whatever digital patient record and other clinical systems a hospital may have installed or plans to use, said David Sharbaugh, founder and president of the SmartRoom entity.
SmartRoom joins a list of other start-up companies launched in recent years by UPMC to commercialize health IT related technology innovations developed at UPMC.
Other UPMC companies include Via Oncology, which sells UPMC developed clinical decision support tools to cancer doctors, and most notably Stentor, a digital medical imaging technology company that was sold in 2005 to Philips for about $280 million.
Through the ultrasound tags provided by Sonitor Technologies, SmartRoom recognizes clinicians and other hospital workers when they walk into patients rooms.

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