Compassion in Practice

PIVO™: Needle-Free Blood Draw

The blood draw is an essential part of practicing medicine — impacting 70% of all diagnosis. In fact, during an average hospital stay, a patient undergoes between ten and twenty blood draws, with 40% of those disruptive draws being done between 2:00 and 6:00 am.

No one is comfortable with this procedure; not the doctors, not the nurses and certainly not the patient or their family members.

At Griffin Hospital, we’re changing the way blood draws are done. We are extremely proud to be the first facility in the state of Connecticut to offer needle-free blood draws with PIVO from Velano Vascular.

As a Planetree designated hospital, Griffin is committed to designing our care processes to improve the patient experience.  By implementing PIVO hospital-wide, and being the first hospital in the state to do so, we are changing the way we practice medicine, offering a more humane, gentle approach to drawing patients' blood.

FDA-approved PIVO is a needle-free device that connects to the IV that has been placed in the patient’s arm, alleviating the need for patients to endure additional venipuncture, or needle sticks, to draw their blood.

Eric M. Stone, Velano Vascular’s Chief Executive Officer, explains:

It turns out that IVs are great at putting fluids into the body, but notoriously unreliable at pulling them out – that’s why patients receive so many needle sticks while in the hospital. PIVO turns the routine IV into a reliable conduit for drawing high quality blood samples, without requiring subsequent needle sticks or accessing central lines for labs.

Even if you are not one of the 1 in 5 people who suffer from a clinical fear of needles, drawing blood is never a welcome process. Hospital stays can be pain- and anxiety-provoking enough without having to be stuck with a needle over and over.

In the long-run, PIVO is cost-efficient too — for both the hospital and you.

PIVO is compassion in practice. For everyone. www.velanovascular.com