Virtual Nurse Serves Pre-Discharged Patients

A virtual nurse was created by a North-eastern researcher. The nurse will assist those patients who are about to release from a hospital stay to know and obey the care instructions. Timothy Bickmore, Assistant Professor of Computer and Information Science, and Developer of the Virtual Nurse, said that self-care regimens for post-discharge patients are normally complicated because they undergo 10 medications and many follow-up appointments. It is more risky for patients who have a hard time in reading and following medical instructions. A pre-discharge talk will take less than eight minutes. The virtual nurse is intended to relay more information to pre-discharge patients. There is an animation that can bring the patient to the bedside by means of computer on a wheeled stand. Here, the patient can control the interaction using a touch-screen monitor. With the use of virtual nurse, patients may spend about 30 minutes in re-examining After-Hospital Care Plan booklet given to them.

At Boston Medical Center, the 3-year clinical experiment of the virtual nurse will be happening and it started last fall of 2008. The said trial will eventually register 750 patients in which 220 are already participated. The low health literacy patients discovered the user-friendliness of the system but they prefer to receive data from a real doctor or nurse.  Bickmore added that the patients also appreciated the virtual nurse as an extra reliable source of their medical information. The study of the virtual nurse is the effect of the group effort of Bickmore and the Boston Medical Center. Thanks also to the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute of the National Institutes of Health, and the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality for sponsoring the research. [via]