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Medical device - Blood pressure cuff barrier

[Category : - HEALTH]
[Viewed 1824 times]

Blood pressure cuff has long been identified in medical journals as one of the devices that has the potential of transmitting infection among patients in clinics, hospitals, and long term care facilities. Today's high cost of healthcare services has made it almost impossible to provide each resident his/her own blood pressure cuff. The solution to this medical problem is a well-designed blood pressure cuff barrier that is safe, economical, and easy to use.

Pursuing a career in medical field, I had been to different healthcare facilities during clinical rotations, and have witnessed nurses and CNA's bypassing the process of disinfecting blood pressure cuffs, exposing residents to the danger of contracting drug resistant microorganisms from other colonized but asymptomatic residents. Generally, the standard procedure is to use chemical sanitizer wipes to disinfect blood pressure cuffs, and this is where the infection control practice is compromised. It takes 3 to 5 minutes of soaking the cuff with cleansing agent and about the same amount of drying time for this procedure to be effective in killing pathogenic microorganisms, and healthcare personnel just won't have such time to do that after each use.

Learning from past experiences, hospitals are now using a dedicated cuff for each patient. This practice, however, is costly, and there is still a chance of rebound infection from the same cuff after a patient is initially treated for infection upon admission.

There are already different types of blood pressure cuff barriers in the market, but very few facilities if any ever use them. I believe this is due to the fact that these barriers are fitted on and off on the arms of patients before the blood pressure cuff, making the process of taking blood pressure more time consuming for the healthcare personnel. There are also other patented designs of blood pressure cuff barriers, but they bank on antimicrobial properties and are designed to be used repeatedly on multiple patients.

My design of a rip-away blood pressure cuff barrier prevents transmission of germs among patients/residents in an advantageous way - it provides new and clean contact surface each time. It is more economical as it uses only a film of preferred material (polymer or copolymer) for each patient, and saves healthcare workers' time because the stack of rip-away liners are fitted into the blood pressure cuff itself and not to the arm of a patient. Accuracy is not an issue, as my extensive experimentation has proven that the sphygmomanometer will give accurate results up to a certain thickness of the stack of rip-away films.

I strongly believe that it won't take very long before the CDC, through its branches Health Infection Control Practices Advisory Committee (HICPAC), and Division of Healthcare Quality Promotions (DHQP), recommends the use of blood pressure cuff barriers in immunization centers, dialysis centers, community health centers, clinics, home cares, long-term care facilities, and possibly, in hospitals also.




Financial information

I only have the provisional patent right now, and I am planning to file the utility patent soon. I am willing to negotiate with interested parties as to whatever arrangement they may want to offer.

This device is very simple and inexpensive to manufacture, yet the economic prospect is very encouraging.

The Journal of the American Medical Association, May 19, 2015, Vol 313, No. 19, states, "in the United States, patients make 1 billion visits to physicians’ offices every year." If you can make a profit of 5 cents for each barrier film per patient's visit, that would translate to a revenue of 50 million dollars annually. Plus, there are about 8 million residents in long term care facilities in the US (Vital and Health Statistics, December 2013, Series 3, Number 37), a good percentage of which are being monitored for their blood pressures every shift. Just a 10% of that population will use 2.4 million barrier films per day and you can have an idea how much potential does this device brings to the table.








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