When you’re talking about continuous dialysis and plasmapheresis for sick kids, you want state-of-the-art technology. And that’s just what Children’s of Alabama got this year when hospital administrators approved a significant investment in the newest generation of the PRISMAX system for the Pediatric and Infant Center for Acute Nephrology (PICAN).
The PICAN team is no stranger to these therapies; after all, the team has provided them for more than 500 children for over 10,000 days since 2013 in the pediatric, neonatal and cardiac intensive care units. In 2020, the newest PRISMAX became available, and Children’s became the first hospital in the state and one of the first children’s hospitals in the country to receive the new machines, said David Askenazi, M.D., who directs the PICAN. “We are very grateful to the hospital for making this available to us and our patients,” he said. “We know that patients will benefit.”
But first, everyone had to be trained to use the new machines. While it sounds like replacing the old with the new should be a relatively simple switch, the staff required intense education.
“The educational part of the rollout was very important,” said acute dialysis coordinator Daryl Ingram, RN, BSN, CDN. “We had to make sure the nurses and physicians were comfortable with them before they started using them on patients.” He was pleasantly surprised at how the entire team embraced the new technology and the groundbreaking opportunity the new machines offered, he said.
One reason could be the improvements the new system brought. For instance, nurses no longer have to manually empty 5-liter effluent bags. “It definitely saves time,” said Suzanne Gurosky, RN, ECP, the dialysis charge nurse. She also touted the battery backup in the machines, which enables patients to ambulate and even do physical therapy while still connected. Another plus is the ability of the machines to decipher the cause for an alarm—because someone moved or jostled the fluids, or because there was a real issue going on. That helps avoid disruptive alarms and alarm fatigue.
It does this through artificial intelligence, “so it understands what’s happening better than it used to,” said Dr. Askenazi.
The new PRISMAX also sports improved safety features, such as correcting itself for fluid removal. In addition, it provides extensive data that can be integrated into the department’s quality-improvement initiatives. “We’re excited to dig into that information and incorporate it into our practice,” said Dr. Askenazi.
After the training and the successful integration of the new PRISMAX machines into the unit, there was one more thing the team needed to do: name them. “We like to name our machines to help the kids feel more comfortable,” said Ingram. The winners were Rosie, Max, and Astro from the old “The Jetsons” cartoon, Johnny 5 from the movie “Short Circuit,” and C3PO from, of course, “Star Wars.”
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