Creo Customer: Livengood Declutters the Hospital Room

By Geoff Hedges | Published: August 25, 2011

Falls at hospitals are both dangerous to patients and surprisingly common. In fact, they’re often used as a quality measure of facilities–and not in a good way; nobody wants to be the hospital with high accident numbers.   Medical journals are full of studies trying to pinpoint the cause and prevention of patient falls. But while researchers mull over the impacts of age and medication on “fallers,” Livengood Medical thinks there might be an engineering solution.

Livengood designs and manufactures “mobile patient care environments.” That is, portable carts that can hold all of a patients’ multiple tubes, IV bags, pumps, oxygen, and electronic monitors in one place. By tidying up the hospital room and putting essential equipment on a sturdy, moveable platform, Livengood solves numerous problems:

• Patients can stay attached to life-saving devices when moving to surgery, to testing equipment, or even to the shower.
• Patients can support themselves with their cart, like a walker, as they amble through hospital hallways.
• Hospital staff and family are all safer and can move more freely around the patient.
• Hospitals have more flexibility to accommodate surges of patients in disasters, pandemics, and other public health emergencies as the Livengood platform greatly reduces the space needed to care for patients.

With so many medical devices attached to 21st century patients, it’s inconvenient and hazardous to have cables, tubes, and cords spread around the bed. With a stable mobile platform that can hold everything, move it, and support the patient all at once, there’s less risk of accidents of all sorts when moving patients and even when navigating the hospital room. Entrepreneurial Livengood uses Creo’s direct modeling approach for its flexibility because customer requirements change so fast, even late in product development. A great example of how a business can unlock value with Creo. Look for Livengood featured in this episode of The Product Design Show.