Thousands of nurses are hurt lifting hospital patients. Can a Durham startup help?
Every year tens of thousands of nurses and other hospital employees across the U.S. injure themselves moving bedridden patients.
It’s such a common occurrence that nursing is a leading occupation for back injuries. Nurse assistants and orderlies, in fact, are three times more likely to suffer back injuries than construction workers, according to an NPR analysis of U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data.
The injuries cost hospitals tremendously and can lead to workers leaving the industry entirely. One estimate found that workplace injuries to workers cost the health care industry $13.1 billion and more than two million lost work days in 2011 alone.
The challenge of moving patients might only increase, too, as obesity rates continue to rise. Around 42.5% of American adults over the age of 20 are considered obese, a number that has increased significantly in the past few decades, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
That means hospital patients, many of whom are already unhealthy, are getting larger as well. It’s not uncommon to find patients weighing over 300 pounds and significantly smaller nurses having to move them.
A young Durham medical device startup believes it can help eliminate some of these injuries.
Seneca Devices, founded in 2017 by then-Duke University undergraduate Samuel Fox, is introducing a device that can boost and rotate patients at the simple press of a button.
Devices that assist the lifting of patients already exist on the market, but Seneca’s device, called EasyShift, offers a simple approach with few steps, as opposed to some machines that require many steps and the help of several employees.
EasyShift attaches directly to a patient’s bed and mattress. It sends air up and down the mattress that both boosts a patient in bed and rotates them to their sides. The use of air and a fabric that reduces shear helps prevent abrasions caused by movement, an important element as elderly patients can have very thin skin, Fox said.
“This has been a problem forever,” Fox said in an interview. “But once patients started becoming older and obesity rates increased, it really highlighted the issue.”
EasyShift focuses on the routine repositioning that nurses have to complete several times a shift. Patients are often required to be rotated every two hours to help increase blood flow and prevent things like bed sores.
“We’re supposed to move patients every two hours, and you might need like four people to move somebody. That’s a lot of resources,” said Ryan Shaw, a director of the Health Innovation Lab at Duke’s School of Nursing. Shaw and the innovation lab have worked with Seneca extensively to test EasyShift.
“If we can make that more efficient, it’s good for patient care,” Shaw added.
Fox believes you could find $40,000 in labor savings per bed by using EasyShift, just by reducing the number of workers and time it takes to reposition a patient. That doesn’t include savings from avoiding worker’s compensation and reduced bed sores, he added.
Fox originally conceived of the idea of EasyShift as a junior at Duke, as a way to help patients get from a bed to a wheelchair.
But after countless hours of revising the device, and testing it with nurses at the the Health Innovation Lab, Fox said it became more reasonable to focus on repositioning.
The company works out of a small office at First Flight Venture Center, a health-and-science startup incubator in Research Triangle Park, and spent hours using the incubator’s prototyping lab building different designs for EasyShift.
“We made a lot of mistakes and design changing,” Fox said of the past four years. The size of EasyShift, for example, has been reduced dramatically, from something the size of a small chest of drawers that had to be wheeled into a room to a box that hooks onto the end of a bed. “Hospital rooms are very small,” Fox noted.
The next year will be a crucial one for the company, which has raised more than $1 million from investors, according to Fox.
The company hopes to role out a trial at Duke University hospitals that will determine the current design’s viability. For the past year, it has been collecting data on EasyShift at the Health Innovation Lab, which has shared safety data with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
Shaw said it’s important that any device prove it can operate consistently. “You can imagine, to get to that point to use it on a sick patient in the ICU, we need some level of trust in a device,” he said.
Shaw said he’s optimistic that EasyShift will be a success once introduced in the hospital.
“I don’t know of anything on the market, like this, that combines both the turning and the boosting,” he said.
The idea of using EasyShit to boost inclined patients up the bed, Shaw said, came from talking directly to nurses. When patients are inclined, they tend to sink to the middle of the bed over time.
“It was originally just to turn people, and then when Sam started talking to the nurses,” Shaw said, “they said in the ICU, actually, we need to pull people up in bed.”
“That’s a really difficult move on your back if someone’s like 300 or 400 pounds. You might need a lot of help,” he added. “But if you can just press a button, it’s useful, so I’m very I’m hopeful that this will take off.”
This story was produced with financial support from a coalition of partners led by Innovate Raleigh as part of an independent journalism fellowship program. The N&O maintains full editorial control of the work. Learn more; go to bit.ly/newsinnovate.
This story was originally published August 11, 2021 at 11:34 AM with the headline "Thousands of nurses are hurt lifting hospital patients. Can a Durham startup help?."
