Seneca Devices
Patient Repositioning made Simple

According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, nurses rank #4 in musculoskeletal or occupational injuries across all professions. If we are to pinpoint a cause, patient repositioning might be a strong starting point. By far, the most common repositioning approach involves the use of slide sheets, where a low-friction fabric is placed under a patient to manually pull them up in bed. Indeed, there have been measures to sort the problem with technology, but most of those solutions are either minor variations of the basic slide sheet technique or time-consuming mechanical devices that do not easily fit into clinical workflow.

Seneca Devices, a leading-edge medical devices manufacturer, is here to flip this script. The company’s EasyShift Repositioning System— is turning heads in the medical community for being able to both turn and boost patients with the push of a button. What makes EasyShift a cut above the rest is its seamless integration with the clinical workflow. Any other repositioning device requires preparation stages, but EasyShift is already on the bed—a simple hospital mattress overlay. All a nurse needs to do is follow a quick 10-minute training guide by scanning the QR code on the device and start using it. “Through our solution, we are alleviating two of the biggest concerns of nurses: time and physical strain,” shares Samuel Fox, founder and CEO, Seneca Devices.

The Advent of a True Mobility Aid

EasyShift is the outcome of a symbiotic relationship between biomedical engineers and the nursing community. Back in 2018, when Fox was pursuing his biomedical engineering degree from Duke University, he had an excellent opportunity to collaborate with Duke Nursing and the Duke School of Nursing to interview dozens of nurses and nursing assistants to understand their clinical workflow pain points. One of the key challenges he learned was repositioning patients of size. While manually turning patients was a challenge in itself, involving 2-3 nurses, turning heavier patients had even greater difficulty, not just from the nurse’s musculoskeletal strain but also from managing patient care protocols and adherence to quality measures. With a scarce nursing workforce and a high patient-to-nurse ratio, manual patient repositioning required assembling lifting teams every two hours. These factors started becoming a major reason for burnout among nurses. Hence, Fox collaborated with the Duke School of Nursing Health Innovation Lab to find a better solution for patient repositioning—the answer to which was EasyShift. “We take pride in this solution as it was developed to fit into the clinical workflow and not the other way round,” expresses Fox.

The company still fuels this user-led innovation strategy for its product upgrades, and its evidence can be found in the company’s leadership team, where Fox represents the biomedical engineering arm and Deborah Lange RN, PhD—its Chief Clinical Officer— highlights the unique point of view of the healthcare workers.

A Patient Repositioning System That’s Beneficial to All

While the nursing community does enjoy the lion’s share of advantages associated with the solution, EasyShift is equally beneficial to the two other key stakeholders: the patients and hospital administration.

The Company’s Easyshift Repositioning System is Turning Heads in the Medical Community For Being Able to Both Turn and Shift Patients With The Push Of a Button

The greatest benefit of implementing EasyShift for hospital administrators is quality assurance and compliance. Hospitals often lose a percentage from the patient care reimbursement if patients acquire decubitus ulcers or pressure injuries during their hospital stay. As per Healthcare Financial Management Association (HFMA) records, healthcare organizations lose up to a staggering $70,000 per patient event. Annually, this expenditure can be as high as $11 billion to compensate for around 2.5 million patients that are affected by hospital-acquired pressure injuries, according to Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) reports. If that wasn’t trouble enough, hospital administrators also have to deal with the increasing number of workers’ compensation claims arising from nurses’ musculoskeletal injuries. The figures usually revolve between $15,000 and $47,000 per employee, as per the National Council on Compensation Insurance. With EasyShift, hospitals can not only streamline clinical workflow but really avert such hefty compensations and improve the bottom line.

Equally commendable is the patient care experience that EasyShift brings to the table. To substantiate, Deborah shares the testimony of a military veteran who was one of the early test subjects of the solution during its development phases. The veteran was strong built, weighed around 400-450 pounds, and was suffering from a back injury. In his heart-touching testimony, he mentioned that it often brought him to tears seeing the difficulty the nurses had to endure just to manually turn him. But, having a device like EasyShift reassured him that someone doesn’t have to get hurt in order to provide him comfort.

Patient safety and patient comfort is a big part of the patient experience during the use of EasyShift. Imagine a scenario where 3-4 nurses gather around you, grabbing the slide sheet, and pulling you up in bed. Such rapid acceleration can contribute to skin tears and other injuries.

EasyShift, on the other hand, through its soft inflatable cushions, moves the patient much more slowly and comfortably.

It is also less disorienting to patients with dementia or bone fractures through gentle, systematic movements as opposed to tugging jerky movements with manual repositioning.

Summarizing the benefits, Deborah calls EasyShift a high tech, low-touch cobotic solution. It is a robotic solution intended to co-assist the nurses, in managing patient care functions such as changing the sheets, managing the tubes and drains attached to a patient, and more.

A Technology That Breeds Success

EasyShift is able to meet patient and staff clinical needs because of its in-house clinical advisory team led by Deborah. Leveraging their decades of experience in the nursing domain, the clinical advisory team is one of the greatest assets for the company to quickly comprehend critical mobility aid trends and challenges in the healthcare domain and serve accordingly.

Owing to such a clinical-centric mindset, Seneca Devices’s growth in the healthcare mobility tech landscape looks promising. In the coming years, Seneca wishes to bolster their patient repositioning system in hospitals and even in at-home care, long-term care, and hospice care settings. The company also plans to develop automated versions of EasyShift with smart features where a caregiver can program a customized, automated repositioning routine that abides by the regulatory requirements (like the Q2 patient repositioning protocol). This upgrade will be a major boon for Seneca Devices’s expansion in the at-home care domain, where the number of caregivers is often limited to one person. Besides these, Seneca Devices is also currently conducting extensive clinical research to understand and improve patients’ mobility challenges for both in-bed and out-of-bed mobility.

Such a promising outlook toward modernizing mobility aids to simplify clinical workflows only stands to reiterate the vision that Seneca Devices started with, and it is not ready to hang up its innovation boots yet. The company believes there are many different kinds of mobility needs arising across the entire continuum of care. In the coming years, Seneca Devices’s mission is to provide the industry with the right mobility tools so that the care providers remain at the helm of offering better patient care.