The hospice industry has been evolving for a few hundred years, with their focus changing slightly but never completely. The original idea behind a hospice is to provide palliative care for the incurably ill. The idea behind hospice care is to provide a warm and comforting environment for patients who are terminally ill. This care does not always have to be provided at a clinical typesetting, but also at the patients home if that is what they wish. Back when the concept started, hospices were places that even provided shelter for travelers and people on pilgrimages, but their main intent never moved too far from their main goal. The popularity of these types of care centers have been on the rise both in the United States and the United Kingdom. A recent report prepared by the Census Bureau, showed the growth of hospice facilities at a staggering twenty-five percent over the last ten years.
Given the nature of the services provided by a hospice and its workforce, once thing is critical as far as function ability and that is mobility. With patients at both at the actual facility and others at their own home settings, the tools and devices used by hospice doctors and nurses must be portable and easy to use. One required device is a
pulse oximeter. A pulse oximeter, also known as a pulse ox by some medical professionals, is a medical device used to measure blood oxygen saturation and pulse rate of individuals. In the past, a pulse
oximeter was a bulky table top unit and then a smaller but still bulky handheld unit. These handheld oximeters are still used on the market, but they have proved to be too big for some applications and cost hundreds of dollars. With recent advances in technology, a new
finger pulse oximeter is available on the market. This new fingertip pulse ox is almost ten percent the size of a handheld unit, and runs on standard batteries. This allows all nurses at hospice care facilities to carry a pulse ox around with them both at the hospice facility and to the homes of patients.
Medical devices which provide both mobility and ease of use tend to be very popular with hospice and nursing home facilities, because they are versatile. Cost is an important factor for these devices, but not always the main factor. As we move forward with advances in technology, we will see more and more medical devices shrink in size, but grow in features.
