Yonge Street Media, a weekly online magazine that covers talent, innovation, diversity and quality of life stories in the Toronto region, covered Bedside Clinical Systems’ (BCS) launch in their Innovation section on Wednesday, November 7, 2012.

BCS is a MaRS Innovation spin-off company created to commercialize decision-support research emerging from The Hospital for Sick Children (SickKids).

Here’s an excerpt:

Bedside Clinical Systems was formed in March of 2011, with a focus on developing tools that help with clinical care for children. After some pilot studies they are now launching their first tool: Bedside Paediatric Early Warning System (BedsidePEWS).

BedsidePEWS is based on research conducted by a Sick Kids scientist, Dr. Christopher Parshuram, who has a particular interest in patient safety. For several years, says Bedside Clinical Systems CEO Rajesh Sharma, he had been “developing a tool to be an early indicator for kids who might be in danger of cardiac arrest.”

That tool is deceptively simple: provide a way for nurses and clinicians to input a patient’s vital signs and key health indicators into a monitoring system whenever they are checked, and use those inputs to create a single numerical score to assess the severity of the patient’s condition. The advantage, however is that  “it takes the subjectivity out of it,” Sharma says. Clinicians no longer need to make tricky judgement calls about, say, whether to wake up an attending physician at 3am if they’re not sure whether a patient needs urgent attention. They have an objective measure to rely on.

Read the full BCS profile article on the Yonge Street Media website.

Posted by Elizabeth Monier-Williams, marketing and communications manager.