Advanced Technology
Patient Safety Simulation Lab 

‘Virtual Patient’ Joins SMHCS Patient Safety Simulation Lab

What do aviation and healthcare have in common?  Both are involved with human beings in a complex, fast paced setting with multiple opportunities for errors and “near misses.”

Borrowing the best and most successful strategies for safety from the airline industry and the military, Sarasota Memorial Health Care System (SMHCS) has created a Patient Safety Simulation Lab in the Center for Advanced Surgery, employing the most advanced technology available in the form of a Human Patient Simulator (HPS).

Grants through Sarasota Memorial Healthcare Foundation, Inc. from the Bradenton-based business Intertape Polymer Group®, the Roberta Leventhal Sudakoff Foundation and the Harry Sudakoff Foundation made possible the purchase of the $250,000 HPS.

The goal of the lab is to improve patient safety by reducing preventable medical errors caused by faulty systems, processes and conditions that lead people to make mistakes or by failing to prevent them.

Meet the “Standard Man”
by Medical Education Technologies, Inc. (METI)

The “Standard Man” is a computerized, full-sized mannequin that is used to provide hands-on experience in true-to-life scenarios.  Through a marriage of “high touch” and “high tech,” the HPS is a dramatically functional mannequin that exhibits extremely lifelike clinical signals and brings a new dimension to education.

The ultra sophisticated and highly versatile HPS blinks, speaks and breathes, has a heartbeat and a pulse and accurately mirrors human responses to such procedures as CPR, intravenous medication, intubation, ventilation and catheterization.  This simulated man has an array of systems – cardiovascular, pulmonary, pharmacological, metabolic, genitourinary (male and female), and neurological – that can be programmed by the computer operator to mimic just about any medical situation and the unexpected, as happens in real life.

“These mannequins allow our staff to experience routine procedures, rare conditions and life-threatening emergencies in a realistic, but patient-safe environment,” explained Pamela Tenaerts, M.D., M.B.A., director of the Clinical Research Center and Center for Advanced Surgery at SMHCS.