Bridge Design

The Alair Bronchial Catheter won its bronze in the Surgical Equipment, Instruments, and Supplies category.  The Alair System and Bronchial Thermoplasty procedure is the first FDA-approved long term treatment to help control severe asthma, which affects over six million patients worldwide.  The device delivers energy to the airway wall to reduce airway smooth muscle and is currently the only device-approach for treating asthma on the market.

Download this for a copy of the Alair case study.  You can check out the 2012 MDEA winners here.  For more about Alair, go here. 

Bridge collaborated with Smiths Medical to create the next generation of Smiths' flagship ambulatory pain management pump. The CADD-Solis pump is designed to deliver pain management drugs safely and effectively. Click here to visit Smiths' website.

The project was the result of researching the needs of each set of stakeholders who contribute to pain medication delivery, from hospital risk managers, to pharmacists, to the doctors and nurses who program the pumps. Bridge's role focused on the design research, user interface concepts, GUI graphics and industrial design of the pump itself.

CADD-Solis: Improved Features

Three main new user features were created for CADD-Solis:

1. The pump's user interface is designed to reduce medication errors as well as greatly simplify and shorten the time it takes to set up a new patient and modify pump settings. The UI is simple, intuitive, and task-oriented. The on-screen graphics are designed to help make it informative at a glance and provide tools for clinical assessment.
2. The improved remote dose cord is ergonomically designed to sit much more comfortably in the hand of a potentially sleepy patient. It also offers greater ease-of-use for those patients who cannot comfortably use their hands.
3. The medication cassette can now be changed using only one hand, instead of two hands as was previously required.

How CADD-Solis Works

The CADD-Solis system provides a framework that is customized by the hospital. Using PC-based CADD-Solis Medication Safety Software, the hospital creates a customized library of therapy protocols. A therapy might be named by route of delivery, further defined by a qualifier such as patient age and condition, and finally associated with the drugs selected for the protocol. The therapy protocol library is downloaded to all the CADD-Solis pumps in the hospital. The pump user now has a simple and effective way to administer medication.

To set up a patient for drug delivery, the user steps through a sequence of three questions. Only a limited set of safe choices are available at each step during programming, based on the therapy protocol selected. Once a protocol is selected, the user can adjust delivery parameters only within predetermined safe limits. Click here to visit Smiths Medical's website.