The NPi-Connect technology supports patients with serious neurological conditions, including traumatic brain injury, stroke, intracerebral hemorrhage, subarachnoid hemorrhage, brain tumors, and other disorders requiring frequent neurological monitoring. John Muir Health has long used quantitative pupillometry in its Neuroscience and Trauma Intensive Care Units to provide objective measurements of pupil size and reactivity—important indicators of neurological status.
"Any time we can reduce the burden of charting on our clinical staff, patients benefit," says Trudy Lovell, director of Critical Care Services and Nursing Informatics at John Muir Health's Walnut Creek Medical Center. "NPi-Connect gives nurses back valuable time they can spend at the bedside caring for patients instead of entering data into the medical record."
Quantitative pupillometry uses a handheld device to measure how a patient's pupils respond to light. The technology provides objective, trendable data, including comparative left and right pupil sizes, the velocity and latency of the pupils' constriction and dilation, and pupil reactivity, a biomarker of brain function directly measured by the Neurological Pupil index (NPi). Quantitative pupillometry results can help clinicians monitor the neurologic status of patients who may be critically ill, sedated, or unable to participate in a traditional neurologic exam.
Before implementing NPi-Connect, John Muir Health's nurses had to manually enter multiple pupillometry values into the EHR after each assessment. For patients requiring hourly assessments, those small documentation tasks quickly compounded over the course of a shift.
John Muir Health's critical care team led the initiative to bring in NPi-Connect to improve documentation efficiency, reduce the possibility of transcription errors, and help preserve nurses' time for assessing patients, communicating with families, educating loved ones, and coordinating care.
"These assessments are critically important, and having accurate information available immediately helps support clinical decision-making," says Lovell. "Even when physicians aren't physically at the bedside, they can review the latest assessment results in the medical record and make informed decisions about patient care."
With NPi-Connect, nurses perform the pupillometry assessment and dock the device, thereby initiating data transfer directly into the EHR. The technology is especially useful in the neurotrauma ICU, where pupillometry may be ordered as often as every hour. To make the workflow as easy and accessible as possible for nurses, John Muir Health has placed an NPi-Connect docking station in every patient room in the Walnut Creek Medical Center neurotrauma ICU.
"Previously, nurses could be interrupted and might have to wait until they had a free moment to enter the information," says Debbie Parnoff, manager of Critical Care Services at John Muir Health's Walnut Creek Medical Center. "Now the data transfers automatically, allowing nurses to stay focused on caring for their patients."
According to Parnoff, reducing documentation tasks also helps lessen the cognitive burden on nurses caring for complex patients. "When nurses spend less mental energy on repetitive documentation, they have greater capacity to think critically about the patient's overall condition, collaborate with the interdisciplinary team, communicate with families, and anticipate the next steps in care," she says.
The implementation reflects John Muir Health's broader commitment to adopting technology that supports the work of frontline caregivers. Rather than adding another task to the nursing workflow, NPi-Connect removes one, helping improve efficiency while preserving time for patient care.
"The system is remarkably intuitive," Lovell said. "From the start, we knew this would be one of our smoothest technology implementations. The feedback from our nurses has been overwhelmingly positive."
As the only designated Level II Trauma Center in Contra Costa County and an elite Comprehensive Stroke Center and regional leader in neuroscience, John Muir Health's Walnut Creek Medical Center continues to invest in technologies that improve both the caregiver experience and patient outcomes. The addition of NPi-Connect strengthens the hospital's commitment to delivering innovative, high-quality care close to home.
Resources - Backgrounders
Reducing Clinical Risk and Increasing Clinical Confidence: Automated Pupillometry in Critical Care & Emergency Medicine
From Measurement to Connected Care: NPi-Connect Brings Pupillometry Data into the EHR
About John Muir Health
John Muir Health is a nationally recognized, not-for-profit health care organization east of San Francisco serving patients in Contra Costa, Alameda, and Solano Counties. It includes a network of more than 1,000 primary care and specialty physicians, 6,800 employees, medical centers in Concord and Walnut Creek, including Contra Costa County's only trauma center, and an Acute Psychiatric Hospital. John Muir Health also has partnerships with UCSF Health, Tenet Healthcare/San Ramon Regional Medical Center, Stanford Medicine Children's Health, and Optum. The health system offers a full-range of medical services, including primary care, outpatient, and imaging services, and is widely recognized as a leader in many specialties—neurosciences, orthopedic, cancer, cardiovascular, trauma, emergency, pediatrics, and high-risk obstetrics care.
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Ben Drew (925) 947-5387
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SOURCE John Muir Health
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