Patent ID: 8736453

Claim:
A method of alerting one or more healthcare workers to a hospital bed properties configuration which elevates a fall risk for a patient, comprising: linking a plurality of hospital beds over a network to a healthcare system: wherein the hospital beds comprise one or more sensors to monitor one or more hospital bed properties, the sensors operative to detect a state of each hospital bed property and to generate a signal indicative of the state of each hospital bed property for transmission over the network to the healthcare system; and wherein the healthcare system comprises one or more servers each of which have non-transitory computer storage for maintaining at least one patient electronic medical record, for maintaining information relating to a current hospital bed properties configuration received from at least one hospital bed, and for storing computer program logic to assess a patients risk of falling; creating a fall risk profile for the patient, and using information in the patient's fall risk profile to determine a minimum hospital bed properties configuration necessary to mitigate the patient's risk of falling; storing information associated with the patient's minimum hospital bed properties configuration in the at least one patient electronic medical record maintained by the healthcare system; configuring properties of a hospital bed assigned to the patient to comply with the minimum hospital bed properties configuration information stored in the patient's electronic medical record; detecting a current state of the properties associated with the patient hospital bed and sending information indicative of the detected property states over the network to the healthcare system; and the healthcare system generating and sending an alert over the network to one or more hospital workers indicating an elevated patient fall risk if the computer program logic determines that current hospital bed property configuration status information indicates that the patient is present in the hospital bed and the information does not meet the minimum hospital bed properties configuration necessary to mitigate the patient fall risk.