Philips has signed up a group of hospitals to use its IntelliVue Guardian Solution. The deal positions Lakeland Health to roll out a system that will give staff at its hospitals early warnings that a patient’s condition may deteriorate.
Lakeland Health is set to deploy the system at its three hospitals a little more than one year after it first started using the Philips patient monitoring technology. Philips claims the introduction of the technology precipitated a sharp rise in the number of rapid responses and a similarly steep decline in certain health events. Cardiac and respiratory arrests are reportedly down by more than 50%.
Arthur Bairagee, chief nursing informatics officer at Lakeland Health, talked up the positive effect the device and its early warning scoring (EWS) system has had on transcription errors, treatment times and responses to possible emergencies
“With the help of the Guardian Solution, caregivers are immediately notified of changes in a patient's vital signs which may put them at risk for conditions such as sepsis, cardiac arrest or respiratory failure. Frequent monitoring with automated EWS allows caregivers and rapid response teams to respond earlier,” Bairagee said.
Philips picked up 510(k) clearance for the latest version of its IntelliVue Guardian system earlier this year. That regulatory nod cleared Philips to connect the Guardian technology to its wearable biosensor, a single-use, self-adhesive patch that wirelessly transmits health data from its position on a patient’s chest.
Data tracked by the device include heart rate and respiratory rate, metrics that can forecast when a patient is at risk of deteriorating. When collected from patients on general wards that at first blush appear similarly at risk of cardiac and respiratory arrest, the data give hospital staff a way of identifying which patients are most likely to suffer such an event.