

Eventually, Steans and Muelenaer at Carilion, the Virginia Tech College of Engineering and Broselow all came together to work on the process. The idea for a digital version of the Broselow Tape was developed by Broselow, who was working with a collaborator on a Web-based adaptation as far back as three years ago, and Stacy Steans, a pediatric physician at Roanoke's Carilion Clinic Children's Hospital, who was thinking about converting the paper-based data to a wireless format displayed on a monitor. "The challenges arose in an attempt to take advantage of current technology in order to develop a much more enhanced device, such as using the available drug concentration information to calculate volume to administer once a drug has been scanned."

"Doing this was a rather simple task," said Guevara. Emergency medical personnel still will rely on the physical laminated tape to determine the child's care-need level, before utilizing the digital display version. Much of the work to digitize the Broselow Tape for display on LCD televisions was completed by Carlos Guevara, a Virginia Tech master's student in mechanical engineering. "The idea is to give multiple people access to the same info, on a big screen," said Al Wicks, an associate professor of mechanical engineering at Virginia Tech, who serves on the Pediatric Medical Device Institute's leadership team with Muelenaer. One example: the ability to track by barcode-scan the exact types and amounts of medicine administered to the patient. Many of the new features already include input from medical personnel around the country, Muelenaer said. Known as TEAM Broselow, the method is being tested at various hospitals, including facilities in Roanoke, Va., Austin, Texas, and Winston-Salem, N.C., and will be fine tuned as additional input comes in from doctors, nurses and other medical personnel, said Muelenaer.
#BROSELOW TAPE 2017 CHANGES SOFTWARE#
The software running the newly-dubbed eBroselow software program runs on LabVIEW, owned by National Instruments. Muelenaer Jr., an associate professor of pediatrics at the Virginia Tech Carilion School of Medicine, adjunct professor at Virginia Tech-Wake Forrest University School of Biomedical Engineering and Science, and director of the Pediatric Medical Device Institute, located in Roanoke, Va.Ī click of a mouse/remote control can move responders from one screen to another. "We are converting the existing Broselow Tape into an electronic format to improve resuscitation team communications and patient safety," said Andre A. In the instance of burns, an automated calculation of the affected surface area will be displayed, along with automated calculation of fluid resuscitation. Additional displayed information will include medicines administered to the patient, including the time of administration and the next scheduled allotment. The revamped tape will include displaying this information on a large LCD monitor within emergency rooms, for all personnel to see. Using a color coded-format, it provides specific medical instructions – amounts of medicines to dispense or level of shock voltage to emit from a defibrillator, for instance – to medical caregivers based on the height and then subsequent weight of the child. It is designed for children 12-years-old or younger, and having a maximum weight of roughly 80 pounds. The Broselow Tape is a long, durable tape measure used on a child during a medical emergency. The revamp is part of a collaborative effort between Virginia Tech's College of Engineering, Roanoke-based Carilion Clinic Children's Hospital, and Hickory, N.C.-based physician James Broselow, who created the original method some 25 years ago. The Broselow Pediatric Emergency Tape, a well-known paper-based medical chart used by pediatric emergency personnel to provide specific medical instructions to doctors based on a child’s measurements, is undergoing an electronic revamp that displays the information via a large-screen digital format.
