There are two fundamental modes of fall prevention: fall detection and risk management. Fall detection solutions are dedicated to handling falls as they happen: Detecting their occurrence, notifying staff, making sure everything is taken care of in the day to day. Risk management solutions help you measure the risk levels of individual patients and residents of falling, allowing organizations to take steps to reduce that risk before a fall occurs.
Put simply:
Fall Prevention deals with the short term—the falls that are happening right now. This is often a reactive method that does not prevent falls.
Fall Risk Assessment works in the long term—avoiding the fall that could occur in the next month, six months, or even a year.
Fall Detection & Prevention
Fall detection technology solutions commonly face an impossible balancing act—how do you make sure that falls are detected as soon as possible, without bombarding care staff with an endless barrage of false alarms? Make your solution too sensitive, and staff will stop trusting it. Tighten up the parameters, and some falls may slip through without being detected.
The development of artificial intelligence and machine vision has allowed for great advancements on this front – there are many fall detection solutions that utilize these technologies to create solutions with high detection accuracy while still notifying staff of falls immediately and without fail.
VSTAlert is the only technology available today that can detect intent to get out of a bed or chair 30 to 60 seconds before the exit occurs. This means staff are notified before a fall occurs—not after. Its predictive remote monitoring system knows the difference between someone rolling over and attempting to leave their bed.
Postvention
Other fall prevention solutions that utilize cameras or depth sensors in conjunction with AI only send alerts after a fall occurs. We call those “Postvention” tactics. These companies may boast similar rates of accuracy in fall detection (one company reports a 99% accuracy rate in its alarms), but they are simply gathering data to prevent future falls and injuries. VSTAlert is the only preventative solution that allows you to stop a fall from happening altogether and we have the stats to prove it.
VSTAlert boasts an unparalleled 85% reduction in falls. Other technologies have been able to achieve up to 40% reduction, which is significantly lower than VSTAlert’s impact. This is why when it comes to Fall Detection, VirtuSense can confidently state we’re ahead of the pack in every way.
The development of artificial intelligence and machine vision has allowed for great advancements on this front, and there are many fall detection solutions that utilize these technologies with high detection accuracy while still notifying staff of falls too late. Root cause analysis determines the cause of falls, which can help prevent falls 20-40% of the time.
Risk Management
The other side of the coin is long-term population health management – VSTAlert can help people who are known risks for a fall, but communities and health organizations can’t optimize their fall prevention initiatives without a proactive way to identify individuals who are at risk for falls.
Previously, this was done with cumbersome manual tests using large and expensive specialized tools, which also leaves a lot of room for human error. Assessments could take hours, so the organizations that could afford these tools were often faced with low participation rates.
Again, Machine Vision and Artificial Intelligence come to the rescue: VSTBalance can perform these assessments in under two minutes with portable tools that require minimal footprint. But now that this data is so easy to obtain, what do you do with it?
This is what sets VSTBalance apart from competitors: While other solutions might simply sort out high fall risk patients, VirtuSense created an entire ecosystem surrounding the assessments, maximizing the data collected to create treatment plans and assist therapists in treatment, creating actionable strategies for every individual: Low-risk, medium-risk, and high-risk.
This ecosystem is why VSTBalance can achieve results of 70%+ reduction in falls, better results than any of our competitors have been able to measure.
The Bigger Picture
VirtuSense is dedicated to collecting actionable data and making sure the right people receive this data as soon as possible. Using VSTAlert and VSTBalance in tandem allows organizations to create an optimized and highly effective fall prevention plan—screening patients with VSTBalance and using the results gathered to sort high-risk into VSTAlert rooms, allowing you to allocate resources as efficiently as possible.
Our unparalleled results speak for themselves.
