By Dr. Nick van Terheyden aka Dr. Nick
Twitter: @drnic1
Host of Dr. Nick: The Incrementalist – #TheIncrementalist
Now on demand, I am talking to Mike Wang, CEO and Founder of Inspiren and Paul Coyne, Co-Founder, and President. In case you are wondering about the company name Inspiren is a combination of Inspiration and the Chinese word ren a Confucian virtue denoting the good feeling a virtuous human experiences when being altruistic.
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Both have a nursing background and shared common purpose around the delivery of support to the stretched clinical resources in the clinical setting with Paul having his own personal patient journey experience that guides much of their development. They are attempting to make up for the lack of care and attention that exists at the bedside not just from a clinical standpoint but also from a family standpoint.
An interesting side note from my international experiences is that in many other countries the family members are integral parts of the care team in many countries – sometimes through choice but oftentimes because of the lack of resources available in hospitals. The side benefit of this is that care becomes a family and community activity which based on some of the research may actually improve outcomes.
The team comes from a perspective of real clinical need driven by clinical leadership served by technology (and not the other way round) and use a team-based approach accessing different perspectives to understand and bring other approaches, insights, and skills to solve clinical problems. In some instances, they actually benefitted from a lack of understanding of technology and as they put it:
“Imagination was not limited
Don’t know if its possible and don’t let possibility compromise the vision”
Which brought back a flood of memories from the Disney ride “Journey into the Imagination” and especially one of my favorite characters “Figment”.
I included one of the videos of the ride for those of you looking for a trip down memory lane (although the pickings are slim even though the ride is gone now I think the copyright hounds have removed the majority of these posts).
They have developed a single IoT (or actually an IoMT) that includes advanced vision sensors (listen in to find out why this is not just adding cameras and why that is important) “Cognitive Patient care assistant” that offers a triage system for staff and family members with insights into patients that are unsupervised constantly through simple availability of resources allowing the clinical team to focus on the most important thing every second of the day – the patient in front of them now. They are able to track the patient and sense their position and movements and with the addition of machine learning have been able to learn from the sensor about activity in the room, details of the interaction and offer some insights for the need to move patients to prevent pressure sores and detect those at immediate risk of falls.
Incremental learning point
- Coming from a perspective of a real clinical need that is driven by clinical leadership served by technology (and not the other way round)
- A team-based approach that accesses people to bring other approaches, insights, and skills to solve clinical problems
As promised here is the Video from Disney’s Imagination Ride with Figment.
About the Show
For years Dr. Nick van Terheyden aka Dr. Nick, has served as a voice on the impact of new technologies on healthcare, earning a reputation as a leading authority on where the future of medicine is going. Combining powers of observation and real world experience, Dr. Nick has seen many predictions come true and makes the case that innovations in healthcare can be accomplished incrementally, not just by moonshot events. Tune in to hear Dr. Nick: The Incrementalist and his guests discuss what the future of healthcare looks like, how we will get there, and what it will take to improve healthcare for all.
This article was originally published on the Dr. Nick – The Incrementalist blog and is republished here with permission.