Mt. Kisco’s Arrowsight gets business boost from North Shore-LIJ

A Mount Kisco company that provides remote video auditing services to hospitals and meatpacking plants will have its technology put to expanded use in the metropolitan area by the North Shore-LIJ Health System.

Arrowsight Inc. CEO Adam Aronson demonstrates his company’s remote video monitoring system for hospital operating rooms at Arrowsight’s Mount Kisco office in 2013.

A spokesperson for Arrowsight Inc. said the Long Island-based health care system, which includes Northern Westchester and Phelps Memorial hospitals in Westchester County, will add Arrowsight”™s remote video auditing technology to 140 patient care rooms in multiple hospitals and surgery centers to improve patient safety and efficiency.

The video cameras, which are monitored at a call center in India that relays data back to Arrowsight facilities in the U.S., will be installed in surgery suites, intensive care units, endoscopy suites, labor and delivery rooms and emergency departments, according to the Mount Kisco company”™s spokesperson.

A pioneer in infection prevention, North Shore-LIJ Health System is the only hospital in the country using remote video auditing technology in the endoscopy suite to ensure proper cleaning and disinfecting protocols and procedures are followed, according to Arrowsight. If improper procedures are followed, text alerts and reports can be sent by the video consultant to ensure the endoscopic device is not used again until proper cleaning is verified.

The expanded monitoring of endoscopy procedures comes in the midst of an investigation by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration into the safety of duodenoscopes reprocessed for use in multiple endoscopy patients and the causes of drug-resistant bacterial infections or “superbugs” in some patients on whom the devices have been used.

North Shore-LIJ also is expanding its remote video auditing to improve patient flow in intensive care units and reduce the amount of time to transfer patients; to improve patient safety and efficient care in labor and delivery and Caesarean-section rooms, and to ensure continuous Ebola virus preparedness training and protection for all emergency department staff.

North Shore-LIJ”™s flagship hospital, North Shore University Hospital in Manhasset, began using Arrowsight”™s remote video auditing and feedback in 2008 to monitor hand-washing by staff and improve hand hygiene in its intensive care units. In a three-year study of about 450,000 hand-washing incidents captured on video, North Shore officials reported staff compliance had risen from below 15 percent at the start of the study to 90 percent and above.

Arrowsight”™s founder and CEO, Adam Aronson, is a former currency trader and hedge funds manager who, in the late 1990s, launched a remote video business, Parent Watch Inc., which enabled parents to go online to monitor their children at day care centers. That venture evolved into Arrowsight and its video technology applications for the health care and meat processing industries.