Do No Arm: A Solution for Assessing the Hospice Patient’s Nutritional Decline

Our device, the EZ-Tape, aims to minimize a common problem hospice care centers face early live discharge. Insurance providers such as Medicaid need to be able to establish patient nutritional decline for recertification assessments. Since insurance companies decide whether to cover a patient’s hospice expenses based on these assessments, it is necessary to ensure that patients who require hospice care remain there. However, mid-upper arm circumference measurements, a common metric for measuring patient nutritional decline, have a wide inter and intra-user variability with a high standard deviation. This makes it more difficult for hospice care providers to establish the nutritional decline of their patients and thereby ensure their insurance coverage. We aim to solve this problem by developing a more reliable solution to minimize variability and allow providers to locate the patient’s mid-arm effortlessly. Our device comprises a simple, easy-to-use midpoint-finding mechanism and an automatically tensioned measuring tape. These mechanisms will reduce variability by determining a consistent midpoint location from which to measure MUAC and applying constant tension on the measuring tape regardless of who the user is. This product will prove to be a significant improvement in the field of hospice care for dementia patients and reduce the occurrence of early live discharge.