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H.I.S.-tory byVince Ciotti
2011 H.I.S. Professionals, LLC
Episode # 42:
Bedside
Terminals
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Bedside Terminal Revolution You may remember from an earlier
HIStory episode how daring it
was when Mike Mulhall (of later fame as SMS VP of IDs) dared
toplace a 1052 terminal on the nurse stations at Monmouth
Hospital
in NJ back in 1968 as part ofIBMs pioneering HIS project
there.
In the event, the Selectric style keyboard was so cumbersome
to
RNs and even Ward Clerks (no Unit Secretaries back then)
thatMike ended up putting them in the basement where Kelly
Girls
typed in orders phoned down from the floors (earliest
scribes!).
Well, we are now going to see how it
was not about 15 years later whenmicroprocessors of the early
80s
allowed devices to penetrate that
most hollowed sanctum of hospitals:
patient rooms themselves, soon to
be known as Bedside Terminals.
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The Bedside Pioneer And just who was the early DP vendor who
pioneered this move
of terminals down the hall from nurse stations to patient
rooms?
Ill give you some hints (and Ill bet many of you get it
wrong!):
Starting in the 1880s, this firm was one of the first to
establish a formal
inventions department in essence, the first R&D in office
equipment.
The founder and CEO was a sales maven, who literally wrote the
book in
sales training, sales quotas, commission plans and marketing
strategies. The firm introduced classy brochures that described
products in glowing
terms with skillful descriptions and profusely illustrated
graphics.
By 1928, this pioneering company posted $50M in annual revenue,
making
it one of the top 4 leading firms in early office machinery
suppliers.
One of its early sales superstars was TomWatson, who cut his
teeth selling pianos to
famers in upstate NY in the late 1800s.
Only natural this office gear pioneer would
be the first to build a bedside terminal, so
Who was this pioneering firm??Who was this pioneering firm??
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NOTIBM!!!!!!!! Gotcha, huh? It was the National
Cash Register Company NCR! Tom Watson Sr. started with them
as
a sales rep and learned his skills
from NCRs founder, John Patterson,
who started NCR way back in 1884.
By 1908, Watson was promoted to
sales manager at NCR, but in 1911,
Patterson fired him (sound like any
arrogant vendor CEO you know?).
Watson left and took his amazingsales skills to C-T-R, the firm
who
inherited the Hollerith punched card
system, which later morphed into
IBM. Meanwhile, back to bedside
terminals, and NCRs breakthrough:
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No Peanut!! Around 1982, NCR launched an
amazing project to build a devicethat RNs could hand-carry right
into
a patients room to record vital signs
Temperature, Pulse & Respiration (TPR)
They called this breakthrough device
the PNUT for Portable NursingUnit Terminal, and was it ever
hot!
Pictured on the right is a 30-year old
brochure I saved from the 80s, on
which I wrote the name & phone #of NCRs PNUT Product
Manager:
Wayne Roach are you out there
Wayne? Gimmee a call or email!!
An early developer of the PNUTwas:
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PNUT Developer (Just amazing what you can find on the
Internet these days) Pictured on the left is Bob Reminick,
Project Engineer at NCR from 1982
1984, responsible for the Electrical
Systems and Software design and test
for the PNUT and its "Cradle" (dockingstation). Are you out
there, Bob?
Like everyone else in the HIS industry back the 80s, I
wasfascinated
by the ads for the PNUT that ran in Modern Healthcare, HMFA,
etc.
What an amazing jump from desktop PCs and floppy disks!
The device offered an enormous improvement over the then-
current practice of RNs scribbling patients vital signs on
scraps of
paper, their scrubs, or even the back of their hands, and
then
carrying the info back to the nurse station where it was copied
onto
TPR logs in the chart, with the inevitable transcription
errors
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PNUTs Keyboard Pictured on the right is the PNUTs
diminutive keyboard through whichnurses keyed in the patients
names,
room number, etc. (no bar coding)
Doesnt this look like an inspiration
for the Blackberry, iPhone, and
scores of other modern PDAs!?
Sadly, the PNUT did not sell well,
despite gazillions of leads from
techno-horny DONs (Director of
Nursing no CNOs back then!). They had little budget to buy
high-
tech IT gizmos, and since it touched
patients, NCR had the usual
challenging time with the FDA
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Want to learn more About this amazing bedside pioneer? Then
chase down this FDA
website and read on (Makes you wonder how in the world did they
ever write history
books back before the age of Google, Wikipedia, Yahoo,
Bling)
In the next episode on bedside terminal systems, well cover
one
whose founder walked into Sheldon Dorenfests office in 1985
where we helped him found a firm that lives on to this day
