“Real-Patient” Simulation Helps Transition to Home Care Ventilator

Transitioning a patient from an ICU ventilator to a portable home care ventilator can be a challenging process involving between 24 and 96 hours of trial and error at the bedside. Respiratory therapists at Akron Children’s Hospital have improved this transition by using “real-patient” simulation. The process involves downloading information from the patient’s ICU ventilator to the ASL 5000 Breathing Simulator to create a model of the pulmonary characteristics of the individual child. The respiratory therapist can then experiment with the simulated patient to determine the ventilator and the settings which optimize the patient/ventilator interaction.

The “real-patient” simulation process takes a few hours working with the ASL 5000 followed by approximately an hour tweaking ventilator settings at the bedside. Read the full story.