Could Hospitals Benefit From Personalized Gowns?

A new company named Secure Threads has designed a range of hospital gowns with the intention of reducing medical errors. The comfortable gowns are personalised for individual patients and have information such as a patients name, blood type, allergies, age, medical conditions and emergency contact details.

Inventor of Secure Threads, Jeanne Mattick believes the gowns could help prevent medical error. Mattick’s husband reportedly died owing to a medical error and she hopes these new gowns could go some way towards preventing similar deaths in the future.

'The Institute of Medicine calculates medical error accounts for 98,000 deaths in the United States each year'

Secure Threads is not intended to be worn in surgery, but during recovery and planned over night hospital stays. Mattick says she wears her Secure Threads when alone around the house, just in case of emergency.

Dr Rachel Reitan at Tulane-Lakeside Hospital says, “I think the idea is very good.” However, like any new medical invention, Dr Reitan says she’d like to learn more before fully endorsing Secure Threads, “We always want to do evidence based medicine.  So we would have to do a study.” Dr Reitan does however encourage Mattick to keep pursuing the fight to reduce medical error.

“The people that could really benefit from this are Alzheimer’s patients.” Mattick says helping the elderly is part of the plan, “If they wander off, this would just help the police. It would help anyone who finds them.”

Secure Threads' Gowns Could Help Elderly Patients And Doctors To Identify Their Needs

Secure Threads is based out of Chicago and Mattick already has a patent pending, “You want to be sure that when you walk through the door of that hospital you are not one of those three or four people that has a medical error happen.”

Dr Reitan wishes Secure Threads well, “Do the study. See if it actually makes a difference in medical errors. If you can show that it did, then it’s a great idea. Go for it.”

Is this something you would consider implementing on a wider scale at your hospital? Send your thoughts to the Editor via [email protected] or join the conversation on Businessfriend.

Click here to learn more about Secure Threads