Nutritional Advanced Technology (NAT) System – Software

GNF Technologies has recognized the need to:

• Monitor and document patient’s daily nutritional intake.
• Provide a near real time and historical based nutritional diary of individual patients.
• Record nutritional intake while comparing to calculated optimal nutritional goals.

Patients in dire need of nutritional support can be monitored to better ensure good clinical outcomes.

NAT System Software Features

• Patient demographic information in the current release of the software is manually entered. In future releases of the software, this information will be automatically populated from the facility’s Hospital Information System (HIS).
• Patient Feeding Schedule information indicating daily caloric goals, calories consumed and hourly/daily activity is maintained by the software. This information is measured against the specific nutritional formula being administered to the patient as well as the targeted daily calories and the computed caloric deficit.
• The NAT digital scale module monitors time and rate of nutritional intake automatically.
• Nutritional rate and elapsed time can be entered to the NAT software module to compensate for real time changes in calculated nutrition status.
• Patient Laboratory Information can be correlated to the patient feeding schedule to enhance the decision making analysis required to adjust nutritional formulas to meet targeted nutritional goals.
• In the current release of NAT Laboratory Information is entered manually while in future releases this information will be automatically extracted from the hospitals Laboratory Information System.
• NAT also provides a nutritional Calculator which is a decision support tool that provides “what-if” analysis of how nutritional targets can be met by adjusting rate, over time and altering the formula being administered to the patient.
• NAT also provides the user with a data base of the most common commercial enteral nutritional formulas along with the key nutritional parameters for each formula. The facility can also add any enteral formula to the data base in the event a new formula is introduced into the marketplace.

NAT Hardware – Digital Scale Monitor

The NAT Digital Scale is physically integrated into the IV pole on which the feeding bag and/or bottle is mounted and monitors the weight of the enteral nutritional formula bag or bottle. Based on a parameter which can be set by the clinical staff, the weight of the bag is sent to the NAT software over a wireless network. Based on a change in weight and elapsed time, the amount of nutritional intake can be computed.

If the weight does not change, the patient may have been disconnected from the Enteral Feeding pump. This may occur when the patient has been transported for the purpose of performing a procedure.

In addition, intelligent algorithms track swings in weight of the bag possibly due to movement of the bag during transportation of the patient while the bag is connected. These swings in rate or weight may also occur during the time when the nutritional feeding bad is being changed or if someone has inadvertently disrupted the bag. When the bag stability has been re-established, a new baseline weight is computed and measurement of nutritional intake is resumed.

All events mentioned above are recorded by the NAT software and can be viewed by the clinician to determine historic activity associated with each individual patient.

The end result of the combined NAT digital scale monitoring hardware and software is the ability to mathematically compute nutritional intake over a prescribed time period. Once this has been accomplished, the patient’s clinical team can determine if the rate needs to be changed to compensate for any nutritional deficit.

In addition, when combined with analysis of the patient’s laboratory results, the patient’s clinical team may which to adjust the feeding formula to compensate for a particular deficiency.

NAT provides the clinical team with a library of commercial formula information which can be used to determine the most appropriate nutritional product to meet a particular patient’s nutritional deficit.

In addition to these capabilities, the clinical staff can adjust the mathematical nutritional intake protocol formula to see if such an adjustment will be more beneficial in resolving the patient’s nutritional deficit. This dynamic decision support capability is a dramatic tool not currently available in a critical care setting today.

NAT Care Benefits

GNF has developed a solution which addresses the following needs associated with nutrition of critical care patients:

• Real time decision support tool for nutrition
• Monitors accuracy of Enteral feeding pumps
• Up to the minute diary of nutrition intake which addresses interruptions in feeding as well as calculates nutritional deficit and/or nutritional goals met
• NAT interfaces with EMR for accurate analysis of patient demographics, physical attributes, and laboratory data
• Vendor neutral (any HIS and Enteral Feeding Pump)
• Allows for “what if” analysis to select optimal variables of:
• Feeding Rate
• Feeding Duration
• Feeding Formula