AI Hospital Software Knows Who’s Going to Fall
Illustration: Kati Szilagyi for Bloomberg Businessweek
El Camino Hospital, located in the heart of Silicon Valley, has a problem. Its nurses, tending to patients amid a chorus of machines, monitors, and devices, are only human. One missed signal from, say, a call light—the bedside button patients press when they need help—could set in motion a chain of actions that end in a fall. “As fast as we all run to these bed alarms, sometimes we can’t get there in time,” says Cheryl Reinking, chief nursing officer at El Camino.
Falls are dangerous and costly. According to the Department of Health and Human Services’ Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, 700,000 to 1 million hospitalized patients fall each year. More than one-third of those falls result in injuries, including fractures and head trauma. The average cost per patient for an injury caused by a single fall is more than $30,000, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In 2015, medical costs for falls in the U.S. totaled more than $50 billion.