Guest: Dr. Zachary Palace
Presenter: Neal Howard
Guest Bio: Zachary Palace, MD
Medical Director, Hebrew Home at Riverdale by RiverSpring Health
Zachary Palace, MD, completed his undergraduate training at Yeshiva University, where he received his Bachelor of Arts degree in Biology and Hebraic Studies. He attended the State University of New York-Downstate Medical School, where he received his MD degree. He completed his residency training in Internal Medicine as well as a Fellowship in Geriatric Medicine, at Staten Island University Hospital, and is board-certified in both specialties. He is credentialed as a CMD by the American Medical Directors Association (AMDA).

Segment overview: InSight™ is the latest product from EarlySense, the market leader in contact-free continuous monitoring.
Dr. Zachary Palace has been using EarlySense products at the Hebrew Home at Riverdale. Since using EarlySense, his facility has reduced the frequency of patient falls by almost 40% and has seen a significant reduction in the number of re-hospitalizations.

Transcription
Health Professional Radio – EarlySense InSight™

Neal Howard:   Hello and welcome to Health Professional Radio, I’m your host Neal Howard for this Health Supplier Segment here on Health Professional Radio. Thank you so much for joining us today. As many as half of this nation’s one and a half million nursing home residents will fall at least once every year, now that’s according to the CDC, our guest in studio is Dr. Zachary Palace, and he’s here today to talk with us about Insight as the latest product from EarlySense. EarlySense is the market leader and contact free continuous monitoring. Welcome to the program doctor.

Dr.Zachary Palace:   Thank you, thank you for having me today.

N:   Thank you. Now, you’ve got some experience with Insight. Talk a little bit about your background, what exactly is your specialty as a health practitioner?

P:   Sure. So, I am board certified positioned on internal medicine and geriatric medicine and I currently work as the Medical Director of the Hebrew Home for the Aged at Riverdale which is a large long-term care facility and we have nursing home patients over 800 of them as well as we have patients who are with us for a short stay and I guess physical therapy, occupational therapy while they’re with us and then return back to the community. So over the course of the last few years, we’ve had a lot of experience with this equipment, and seems to have a huge amount of benefit.

N:   Now are these 800 plus residents all in one facility or are they spread out over some satellite sites as well?

P:   It’s one facility, it’s just one facility.

N:   That’s amazing. I suppose that you were having problems with slips and falls and I guess some problems do the just general monitoring with that many residents.

P:   Sure, as you mentioned the elderly are prone to falling and a fall in an elderly person could be a very serious event. Falls are associated with increased morbidity, mortality, fractures, a lot of issues come up with falls and we want to try to do whatever we can to reduce the incidence of fall, and to help keep our patients safe.

N:   In your experience, you’ve got one and a half million nursing home residents nationwide and they’re all due for at least one fall this year and possibly in each of the years throughout the rest of their lives. What was it that prompted you to change your method of monitoring over to Insight?

P:   Well we learned about this equipment several years ago. The company is based in Israel and the more I read about it and learned about it, the more I realized that this equipment that is really ideally even though it was created for the hospitals in … it’s really ideally situated within the nursing home facility and typically we don’t think of technology and innovation in the same sentence as nursing homes, most people don’t usually think that way. When you hear of a nursing home, you don’t think of cutting-edge technology, but this type of equipment is actually, it’s really neat and what it is is it’s a contact list system, the censors actually sit underneath the matches, the patient’s totally unaware that it’s even there.

N:   So there’s no a monitoring a machine next to the patient’s bed when they’re trying to get out in and go to the restroom and they have to move it or anything like that?

P:   No, actually that’s one of the nice things that there’s no clinical feel to it. The patient doesn’t even know it’s there or may not even know it’s there. There are no wires attached the patient, the sensors are right underneath the mattress and in real time it records a lot of important data, it records heart rate, it records respiratory rate and it records movement in bed. And that’s important information that we can use in terms of assessing our patients earlier.

N:   How seamless a system is it when it comes to integrating it into your current network?

P:   So, the system itself is really self-contained and it integrates in actions segrates very nicely. All this important information like I’ve mentioned, the heart rate, the respiratory rate, the movement in bed, all that information in real time gets transmitted directly to the to the nurse’s station. So the nurses get this information and then, if any of the indicators alerts like if there’s a high heart rate or a low heart rate, or a respiratory rate that’s out of the range of normal, or increased activity in bed, that’s going to send an alert to directly to the nurse that says “Hey, something is going on with this patient. You should see them now”. And very often when the nurse responds to that alert she’ll identify an issue that could it become a potential problem, for example if the patient is moving a lot in bed, that’s an indicator to us that that patient might be at increased risk of fall so this system actually lets us identify the person who’s going to fall before they actually fall so we prevent the fall.

N:   That’s amazing.  Has the Hebrew Home at Riverdale seen I guess some identifiable cost savings as those savings relate to added efficiency as far as monitoring?

P:   That’s a good question, in actuality we’ve seen a significant reduction in the rate of fall and falls are associated as I’ve mentioned with a lot of other problems, fractures and more serious conditions so that from that perspective, we’re able to keep our patients healthier. But in reality, by alerting the nurse that a patient is moving in bed or the patient hasn’t  moved much in bed that’s going to trigger the nurse to see the patient and rotate the patient. And there are timers incorporated into the system that will alert the nurse to rotate the patient, by rotating the patient from side to side and changing position that’s going to prevent the development of bed sores, and bedsores are a major issue in the nursing home. So by reducing the rate of bed sores, there’s a significant cost savings to the facility.

N:   Now bedsores, you’ve mentioned being just one of those concerns for the hospital’s administration staff, but especially concerned for the love ones who’ve may have made the decision to put someone in one of these long term care facilities. How easy does Insight make it for caregivers or loved ones to get information about the patient?

P:   Well all this information is recorded so that they’re able to have an access toward and they have a tremendous increase in their level of comfort. It’s not easy to put anybody into a nursing home, it’s not easy to make that decision for anybody to put their loved one into a facility.  But knowing that there’s an extra layer of oversight and coming back to what you’ve mentioned earlier as well, by identifying changes in the heart rates, by identifying changes in respiratory rates, and the responses in those alerts we’re able to identify conditions earlier. So for example, what could be today’s cough could become tomorrow’s pneumonia, but by picking it up earlier we’re able to treat it and we’re able to treat patients in place. So patients that might become ill and end up having to be transferred from the nursing home to the hospital by identifying that earlier, we’re able to treat them at the facility and avoid hospitalization which is a win-win for everybody.

N:   Now in closing Dr. Palace, talk about some of the response from the staff there at the Hebrew Home at Riverdale as far as sometimes there is a resistance to change when a certain system has been in practice for such a long time.  Talk about the response as far as the user-friendliness of this technology.

P:   Sure, the nurses have come to appreciate it. They’re used to doing business as usual, used to doing things the way they’ve always done them so change is always a little bit difficult at first, but when they realize the benefits to them as well as to the patients, they been very, very excited about it and readily adopted the system.

N:   Where can our listeners go and get more information about Insight, EarlySense, and the Hebrew Home at Riverdale?

P:   To learn more about the Insight system, you could go to www.earlysense.com to learn more and they’ve got an exciting website with all these information on it. To learn more about the Hebrew home, you could go to www.hebrewhome.org.

N:   Thank you so much. You’ve been listening to Health Professional Radio, I’m your host Neal Howard for this health suppliers segment here on Health Professional Radio. We’ve been talking with Dr. Zachary Palace today about insight, the latest product from Early Sense that market leader in contact free continuous monitoring. It’s been great having you here with us today doctor.

P:   Thank you so much for having me.

N:   Thank you. Transcripts and on audio of this program are available at healthprofessionalradio.com.au and also at hpr.fm and you can subscribe to this podcast on iTunes.

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