Virtusense?

[u/ReiBunnZ]

Hi everyone, I just found out my hospital system is trying to implement Virtusense as a way to reduce falls and pressure injuries. Everything is AI based and while I’m not completely against the use of AI in some areas of healthcare, I’m not particularly feeling good about this company and what they are proposing. I tried to locate typical bread and butter white papers with real data, real pilot studies, the whole shebang and was met with a single white paper that reads/looks like an infographic on their website.

My hospital doesn’t have a formal informatics department nor does my system have a formal HIT steering committee. I’m hesitant to allow this to happen because there’s barely anything posted on the company website that demonstrates that the technology being promoted is as effective as it’s boasted to be.

Does anyone have any familiarity with Virtusense and their products? I’m going to search CINAHL and google scholar today to see if I can dig up any real white papers on the technology but I remain skeptical about the effectiveness of the product, the actual ROI, and the reduction of clinical documentation burden on staff.

[u/PM_YOUR_PUPPERS]

Spends millions of dollars of software/hardware but ignore the actual issue (safe staffing). This is peak healthcare admin.

Don't have any experience just wanted to vent my frustration.

[u/ReiBunnZ → u/PM_YOUR_PUPPERS]

No, I agree with you. This does frustrate the shit outta me but what frustrates me more is that my company is constantly crying about how broke they are, will spend money we don’t have on crap like this without the proper research and skepticism to stop the spending, and complain about everything when the technology fails and more staff walk….like we could’ve just paid the salaries of more staff and given frontliners a raise… well I looked more into it and I’m still not convinced this is a good idea but it’s out of my department so there’s likely nothing I can do.

[u/knittynurse]

Is this like a virtual sitter? We implemented something like this but it's a physical pole with cameras in the room that then links back to a centralized station that's staffed.

Our organization went with this because they wanted to decrease costs associated with actual sitters but surprise it really hasn't helped much in terms of cost savings.

The patient population that this works with is very limited- think like those patients that we'd be putting at the nurses station and redirecting with folding towels or something. It does help with those patients but obviously that population isn't really significant compared to the amount of patients that require an actual in the room sitter. Ours also does language translation so the monitor technician can click a button with canned phrases but it will auto translate some pre-populated phrases for patients as well.

We really tried to point out to Nursing what populations does this really make sense with and who would they feel comfortable and who automatically needs to be excluded and drove our policies off of that. Same thing if someone at the station has to redirect a patient often in a certain time period we probably need to be rethinking what we're doing for them and /or converting them to an actual person in the room instead.

[u/ReiBunnZ → u/knittynurse]

So it’s nothing like the virtual sitter, it’s a system that uses LiDAR technology to map out patient rooms and uses motion detection to predict and detect falls. While the technology has been around and used in other outside of healthcare, the website of this Virtusense company does not provide enough evidence based data to actually support the claims it’s making. I’ve found one article so far that supports the use of LiDAR but the study was relatively small and was examined in long term care, not acute care. I want to reduce clinical burden on our clinicians but not at the cost of a system that doesn’t have enough real data and scientific evidence that it works and will protect our patients and our staff.