Chicago, Dec 20 (Inditop.com) Who wouldn’t like to go to a fun place for kids with a cosy camp for a jungle adventure, an encounter with swashbuckling pirates or a cool coral place to rest after a journey to the stars? But the catch is it’s only for kids who need to go to a hospital to get an x-ray, an ultrasound a CT or MR scan.
In this specially designed fantasy world they can get all this minus the anxiety as they run through the specially designed colourful equipment that looks like something straight out of a children’s comic. The General Electric Company, which has been inventing medical technologies for more than a century, unveiled the innovation destination of the future at the annual show of the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA 2009) here.
GE Healthcare, the $17-billion healthcare business of GE, has been working with a number of child life specialists from leading children’s hospitals, the Betty Brinn Children’s Museum and award-winning design firms to develop a solution that would make a hospital visit for the kids a pleasant experience.
The offering is not yet commercially available as GE is perfecting the design to help reduce paediatric anxiety through considerable observational research, expert interviews, and a pilot project at the UPMC Children’s Hospital in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
In the Pittsburgh hospital, there are eight specially designed rooms offering a “Jungle Adventure” for nuclear medicine, a “Planet City” for Magnetic Resonance Imaging or MR and a “Pirate Adventure” or journey through “Coral City” for a CT (Computed Tomography).
Then there is a “Cozy Camp” for PET (Positron emission Tomography), a nuclear medicine imaging technique, which produces a three-dimensional image or picture of functional processes in the body.
As the kids arrive, GE officials explained, they are helped to acclimatise to the appearance, sound, and feel of medical imaging. Only then they go to a procedural theatre that incorporates sensory design elements for the imaging equipment and surrounding radiography room environment.
For instance, the formidable looking CT scanner is transformed into a pirate ship ready for an adventure on the high seas. And in “Coral City”, fish seem to be jumping out overhead as the magnets rotate for a CT scan.
Once the hospital adventure is over, the children are given an affectionate send-off with rewards for their participation.
Studies are on to analyse workflow efficiencies, safety enhancements and satisfaction on the Adventure Series with the primary goal of minimising the anxiety journey for nearly nine million kids going for imaging exams every
year, officials said.
“Coupled with GE’s industry leading imaging technologies, we expect, this offering when it becomes commercially available will provide our customers with a unique and patient-focused solution while exemplifying GE’s commitment to children’s health,” they said.
