UH is the first health system in Ohio to use this device for patients and is helping to pioneer a bold national movement to adopt a more humane standard of care for blood draws.
“As an institution, we continually look for innovative new technologies that improve the delivery and quality of care we provide,” said UH Cleveland Medical Center President Daniel I. Simon, MD. “As caregivers, we strive to serve our patients in the most humane and personal way possible. This new procedure makes it possible for us to do both, elimi-nating the pain and anxiety associated with blood collection while advancing our own high standards and practices.”
PIVO connects to an indwelling peripheral IV catheter, commonly used in hospitalized patients, and enables practitioners to extract high-quality blood samples from the vein, eliminating the need for multiple needle-sticks.
More than 400 million blood draws occur annually in hospitals in the U.S., informing as
much as 70 percent of all clinical decisions. Many of these are conducted in a hospital
setting on patients that receive as many as three blood draws daily.
This number can increase dramatically for the 30 percent of U.S. hospital patients that are considered Difficult Venous Access (DiVA) due to obesity, age, and disease, a condition that makes
blood collection more challenging.
Velano Vascular Chief Executive and co-founder Eric M. Stone is a Northeast Ohio native
and former UH Rainbow Babies & Children’s Hospital patient.
“As a chronic disease sufferer and over the course of multiple hospitalizations as a teenager, I developed a clinical fear of needles,” said Stone. “My personal experience as a patient has informed our person-centered mission at Velano to enable more humane care. Coming full circle, back
to UH and Rainbow, to make this technology a national standard of care will enable our
children and their parents to have their blood drawn in a gentler fashion.”