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Lauren Dubinsky, Senior Reporter | May 19, 2016
From the May 2016 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine
Another issue was the fact that the monitors captured a lot of data that they didn’t necessarily need. To solve that, the nurses looked at the data and decided what really needed to be in the EMR, and Iatric made sure that only that information was entered. Once all of those problems were fixed, the medical center was able to reap the benefits of integration. Most notably, they saw a reduction in error rate and the nurses saved five to 10 minutes every two hours for each patient.
Monitoring a new parameter
Two or three years ago, being able to monitor end tidal CO2 was seen as something that was nice to do, but now it’s becoming almost a standard, just like pulse oximetry, blood pressure and temperature. “Everyone thinks about oxygen, but if your CO2 level is going up that tells me quickly that there is something wrong with your respiratory status, rather than waiting for your oxygen levels to drop,” says Jeff Moffatt, senior marketing manager of interoperability and integration at Dräger.
When the American Heart Association came out with the 2015 CPR updated guidelines, it was strongly recommended to do end tidal monitoring. In addition, the Joint Commission put out guidance for monitoring patients who are on opioids and called for CO2 to be more of a standard of measurement. There has been a great deal of research done that has shown that if you manage a patient’s pain with drugs like morphine, you can improve their condition and get them out of the hospital quicker, says Moffatt. Because of that, there has been an increase in pain management as well as an increase in monitoring these patients.
“One death can really make a big financial impact on a hospital if there is litigation,” says MD Buyline’s Crow. “Buying monitors to make sure that the patients are safe and have good outcomes just makes sense.” Many monitoring systems on the market offer end tidal CO2 monitoring, including Welch Allyn’s Connex Vital Signs Monitor. “As hospitals are more interested in tracking the deterioration of their patients and respiratory depression, end tidal CO2 is definitely a parameter that we’re hearing more about and offering to more of our customers today,” said Welch Allyn’s Shader.
Clinical decision support
In early March, Philips announced the launch of its IntelliSpace Console Critical Care, which is a cloud-based decision support dashboard for the ICU. It was the result of a multi-year clinical study and research collaboration with the Mayo Clinic and Ambient Clinical Analytics. “The complexity of the data you get in the ICU is immense,” says Kriwet. “If you look at the EMR systems right now, it’s totally impossible even for experts in our house to understand what the data is about. At the same time, you are at the point where people are in a situation of life or death.”
The Philips dashboard gives clinicians access to patient data across multiple systems and EMRs to help them analyze and prioritize complex patient data quickly. It’s especially important to have the capability in the ICU where every second matters. The IntelliSpace Console is being hosted on Philips’ HealthSuite digital platform, which is an open, secure, cloud-based platform that can collect, store and analyze data from multiple sources. The Mayo Clinic developed it under the product name AWARE and Philips will be working with Ambient Clinical Analytics to bring it to market in the second half of 2016. “In these critical times it’s so important to make sure that the data you have is organized in a way that is useable for you,” says Kriwet.
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