Healthcare workers at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City are using smart home cameras by Google Nest (NASDAQ: GOOGL) to monitor COVID-19 patients more safely, helping the hospital's overall efficiency when it comes to patient monitoring. Cameras in more than 100 rooms of COVID-19 patients have been installed so far. Ultimately, Google intends to provide at least 10,000 smart home cameras to hospitals across the country in an effort to help keep healthcare workers and patients safe and slow the spread of the novel coronavirus.
In addition to increasing safety measures, there's the issue of staffing which the smart home cameras can also help with by allowing nurses in particular to monitor more patients more easily from the nurse's station. This is an advancement in this area considering that overall healthcare spending has been on the decline in light of over 200 hospitals systems in the country furloughing some of their healthcare workers during the coronavirus pandemic.
"This technology improves our efficiency by cutting down the number of times our medical team has to enter patient rooms, allowing us to preserve protective personal equipment," said Robbie Freeman, MSN, RN, and Vice President of Clinical Innovations at Mount Sinai. "Twofold, it enhances safety for patients because we can keep an eye on everyone from the nursing station, and for our staff, it minimizes the frequency of time spent in-room with COVID-19 patients."
At Mount Sinai, each room that's equipped with Google Nest has two cameras: one to monitor the patient's vitals, and the other for communication purposes. The cameras provide a livestream that feeds to the nurse's station.
"We needed to find a way to give caregivers the ability to check on and communicate with patients that could supplement in-person checks, also helping reduce the use of PPE," Robbie Freeman, a Mount Sinai nurse, said in a recent blog post. "Every minute saved by remotely monitoring the patients can be offered to assist another person in need."
The use of Google Nest at Mount Sinai, and subsequently in a number of other hospitals, so far has proven helpful in providing healthcare to patients in need and improving efficiency based on these reports. In fact, remote health tech like Google Nest has been on the rise amid the coronavirus pandemic and doesn't seem likely to be dismissed once the crisis has subsided.
"As we monitor the situation and plan for surges, we expect this to be a solution that can be easily ramped up for COVID sites," said Stacy Anderson, a Mount Sinai spokesperson. "There is potential for this technology to be applied to additional use cases and care settings post the COVID-19 crisis."