The right bedside system will provide patients and hospital staff with an incredibly useful platform that can operate smoothly for many years. It will increase patient satisfaction, reduce the workload on staff and cut down costs. But before professionals decide on a system, here are 9 questions they should ask:
1. Is the patient system easy to configure?
Nobody wants to tear their hair out trying to navigate complicated settings to set up the system properly for the hospital’s needs. Before you commit to buying any new tech, you need to make your staff can easily manage the devices. One way is a device that’s easy to figure out on the system side, but another is having all the bedside systems connected and cloud-based, so they can be managed remotely by technical staff. This way, they’ll be able to configure every system at once, and it helps greatly if you ever want to roll out a new version of the software with more features on it to benefit patients or staff.
2. Is the system versatile enough to keep patients entertained?
Bedside systems play a big part in ensuring that patients have the most comfortable time possible during their hospital stay. A bare bones system that only offers a small number of TV channels and bedside calling is not likely to satisfy most people. Modern systems capable of licencing and offering patients a large number of on demand TV shows and movies to watch, in addition to being able to browse the internet, play games and connect their own Netflix and streaming accounts.
Other features also help to give patients a stellar experience, such as built-in USB ports to charge their own devices, or the function to easily mount their own devices to systems so they can access their saved media and easily message friends and family on their messaging apps.
3. Have bedside arms been sourced for correct mounting?
Choosing the correct system is only half of the equation when it comes to installing a perfect setup that benefits both patients and staff. It’s also very important to consider the bedside arms where the system will be mounted.
A precision engineered hospital TV mount serves numerous essential purposes. Firstly, it enables the patient to adjust the system screen to a position where they can access it comfortably. It’s especially important to get this right in a hospital, where many patients may have limited mobility, so the mounted arm needs to adapt to a huge number of positions.
This bedside TV mount also needs to help hospital staff do their job smoothly without any obstruction, so it’s vital that the system can be moved aside in an instant when staff need to attend to patients.
These are just a few of the many reasons why the correct mount is vital.
4. Is the system secure?
Many modern bedside systems serves multiple purposes in addition to entertaining the patient. With systems now being configured so that staff can bring up patient’s medical results and data on them, they need to be extremely robust when it comes to security. This comes down to both software and hardware. On the software side, you need to source a reputable company with a track record in creating software for sensitive information, and on the hardware side, you need to consider how only the right medical staff can call up the data. This can be done by implementing keycards or biometric prints into the device so that no one unauthorized can view anything they’re not supposed to.
5. Is the system built to last years of daily hospital usage?
It’s not often the case that hospitals are running at low capacity. The high turnaround of patients in beds on all year round means that these healthcare systems and the mounts they’re attached to will constantly be subjected to heavy usage. To ensure the systems are built to last, you need to consider numerous features.
For starters, they must be certified to technical and healthcare standards. If the systems are UL-listed then it means that provider has their hardware certified.
The devices also need to be resistant to liquid due to the environment they’re in, as not only could liquid damage the device, it could also pose a health risk for patients. Both the system and the hospital bedside arm it’s attached to need to be made of the proper materials that can be cleaned and sterilized daily without any corrosion or liquid seepage.
Summary
We’ve just touched on a few of the aspects you need to weigh up when choosing the right hospital patient system that will last for many years. To get a broader picture of all the things these systems can do, and the amazing bits of engineering that go into making the robust mounts that harness them, do make sure to take a look at some of our other articles below.