NJ Medical Center Makes Digital Big Part Of Its Hospital Rooms Of The Future

November 10, 2022 by Dave Haynes

Health care seems like a particularly attractive and underdeveloped vertical market for digital signage and pro AV products – throttled perhaps by long project timelines, layers of bureaucracy and a pandemic that has kept services providers of all sizes tied up for the last almost three years. But it’s an environment that would benefit greatly from real-time information, and a company called pCare is providing what it calls the hospital room of the future for a facility about to open just across the Hudson from New York City.

Each patient care room in the newly constructed 225-bed, 9-story Hackensack University Medical Center Helena Theurer Pavilion in New Jersey is equipped with a 65” Smart TV running pCare’s Interactive Patient System, including a Digital Whiteboard that displays key patient and provider information, and offers TV entertainment, real-time feedback, and dietary integration for meal ordering. There is also a smart display that shows key patient information at the entrance of their room, tied into digital patient records.

Patients use a bedside tablet to navigate the system, and there is a video conferencing set-up built-in that enables family video visits, consultations with doctors, and language interpretation.

The building – named the Helena Theurer Pavilion for the key donor – also has pCare’s extended audiovisual services, including physiological boards to display vitals, status boards at the nurses station, and full conferencing and AV for an auditorium.

There are all kinds of selling and then deployment challenges to health care, as new build medical centers might take many years to complete, and the buildings can have a lot more going on in them than in a conventional commercial office or retail property. But it is an environment where updated and accurate information can be life-saving, and right now a lot of health care facilities are still using dry erase marker boards at nursing stations and around rooms. As is the case with other digital signage solutions these days, I think it a company that has a broad range of services that stitch into the overall operations of a hospital is going to get more attention than one that can, let’s say, provide software for a donor wall, or wayfinding or the old chestnut of distracting people with screen content in waiting rooms.

In this case, the company does all of that and more. It started out just putting TVs in rooms, decades ago, but has greatly expanded what it does, as well as its partner ecosystem. The new medical center is being touted as the most advanced in New Jersey.