| Nurse Diane
She speaks six languages fluently, comprehends 2,600
different diseases and provides consistent information
to her patients. But she doesn’t wear a crisp white
cap.
Meet
Nurse Diane, an interactive touch-screen computer system
developed to provide information to patients before
they are discharged from the hospital. With the medical
industry suffering from a severe shortage of nurses,
Nurse Diane — short for “discharge information
and needs educator” — helps save time and
resources all around. It takes regular nurses about
a minute to program Nurse Diane with a patient lesson,
on everything from information on diabetes to pain management.
The
result is a 30-minute interactive session between a
patient and Nurse Diane, which provides information
about his or her medical condition. “Instructions
are printed out at the end of the lesson so the patient
can take the text home with them,” says Reid Carter,
co-founder of Patient Education Programs, the Richmond-based
software development company that designed Nurse Diane.
“When the lesson is over the [real] nurse spends
a couple of minutes answering any questions the patient
might have.” Nurse Diane is also equipped with
a special pacing system to ensure comprehension, and
quizzes her patients periodically. If a patient does
not understand a portion of the lesson, Nurse Diane
e-mails an alert to the real nurse at the nurse’s
station. When the lesson is over, a human version can
go over that portion of the lesson again.
Nurse
Diane was tested at Virginia Commonwealth University’s
Medical College of Virginia Hospitals earlier this year.
Carter and his partner, Richard Cross, developed the
program last year after meeting with their company’s
advisory board and with health professionals at MCV
in March. Carter and Cross started fundraising efforts
on Sept. 11, 2001 and, despite the terrorist attacks,
raised the capital they needed by the end of December.
“We
were financed by Greystone Capital [Management LLC]
in Richmond,” Carter says. “We have had only
one round of funding and are hopeful that it will be
all we need.”
The
Nurse Diane system costs between $12,000 and $15,000,
depending on the sophistication of programming, or $195
to $395 per month. Current customers include Bon Secours’
Mary Immaculate Hospital in Newport News, which ordered
six Nurse Dianes, and the cardiology department at Johns
Hopkins University, which ordered one.
—
Holly M. Rodriguez
Return
to Virginia Business - December 2002
|
