Each year, preventable medical errors take the lives of almost 200,000 Americans making it the third leading cause of death in the United States. (Healthgrades 2004) On April 14, 2009, my mom, Louise Batz, went to have knee replacement surgery. That night, a medical error caused Mom to sustain an injury from which she could not recover and she lost her life eleven days later.
Shortly after her passing, my family decided to honor my mother by founding the Louise Batz Foundation for Bedside Advocacy with the hope to better equip and educate families in order to make them stronger advocates of their own care during their hospital stay.
The intention of this App is to provide a tool for families, medical staff, and patients that helps them to monitor care in real time. In addition to charts for medication prescriptions, the App will enable a patient to set alerts and triggers to help remind of medication times while trying to prevent over dosage or wrong dosage. The App acts as a digital library allowing a person to look up terms with which they are not familiar and is filled with everything from videos and articles to help them learn more about the risks associated with things such as high blood pressure and undiagnosed sleep apnea, to pictures and charts that illustrate how to spot kinked IV lines and unplugged leg compressors. In addition, by tracking vital signs such as temperature, an individual will be able to transfer those signs to a graph in order to help a medical team better follow trends and concerns over shift changes. This means that if there was a steady but slow rise in temperature over several hours, a new doctor would be able to more quickly identify the patient as a risk for sepsis, thus decreasing the likelihood of that person being permanently harmed or killed.
When my mother was in the hospital, my family asked millions of questions and it didn’t take long for us to realize that the biggest tragedy of her passing was that it was completely preventable. Our greatest hope is that this App will help you better understand your hospital stay and the role you must play as a member of your care team while providing you the tools and knowledge necessary to keep you and your loved ones safe and sound.