Hospital Buyer

The University of New Hampshire (UNH) has been conducting research to help improve safety in operating rooms (OR). John LaCourse, professor of electrical and computer engineering at NHU, is working to enable computerized OR equipment to communicate and share information. In many ORs, patient beds and monitors are computerized; however the equipment lacks the ability to share information. The research is being conducted with Bedford-based company IXXXAT, Inc. and Massachusetts General Hospital and is part of a larger initiative called the “Operating Room of the Future.”

The Center for Integration of Medicine & Innovative Technology, an organization that fosters interdisciplinary collaboration among experts in medicine, science and engineering, has established the OR of the future, which is used daily for minimally invasive surgical procedures. This living laboratory explores new technology platforms and systems of care for the OR and utilizes advanced, networked communications that shorten procedure and recovery time and reduce pain for patients.

The UNH researchers are exploring the use of CANopen, a communications protocol that uses common hardware and software packages, and has been used by the automotive industry for several years. The short-term goal is limited to automatically calibrating an invasive blood pressure monitor based on changes in a patient’s elevation and angle as the result of repositioning a surgical table. The long-term scope of this project is to develop an open Medical Device Plug-and-play (MD PnP) standard for medical devices that allows them to operate interactively and communicate essential data. Therefore, the output data from one device is used as input data to another device to facilitate automatic control of a surgical procedure. Patient safety may improve because instead of manually or mentally calibrating each machine, medical personnel would push a specified button for the desired procedure.

February 22, 2007 Related topics: IT & software