Update below A discussion about wearable technology highlighted the need for hospitals to develop more effective ways of patient monitoring to avoid the grim reality of finding patients dead in bed from respiratory distress, for example.
Covidien Vice President and General Manager of Patient Monitoring, Matthew Anderson, emphasized the needs in low acuity care for better monitoring devices. Covidien recently bought wearable monitoring company, Zephyr Technology for an undisclosed.
Among the other panel participants were Benjamin Mallory, Astra Zeneca director of digital strategy; Homero Rivas, the director of innovative surgery at Stanford School of Medicine; and Mike Speck at Movable.
Anderson said the company was seeing a greater interest in expanding monitoring, especially for low-acuity patients due to several challenges hospitals face. They include patients needlessly going to the ICU to reducing the rate of patients that require re-admission within 30 days of discharge and identifying patients who are fall risks. He listed four important needs that monitoring devices had to fulfill.
Provide environmental context: For example, is the patient sitting or standing? Is she walking? Has she fallen? That’s valuable information that clinicians need to get.
Devices need to be unobtrusive to patients’ lifestyles so they’re more likely to be used. Ideally, the patient doesn’t realize the monitoring technologies are there.
Data management is an important balance to get right. Too much information, and the technology becomes inefficient. But too little, and it’s no help to the medical professionals who need more. It’s important to think about how data is disseminated and the kind of devices clinicians can use to view it.
A Deep-dive Into Specialty Pharma
A specialty drug is a class of prescription medications used to treat complex, chronic or rare medical conditions. Although this classification was originally intended to define the treatment of rare, also termed “orphan” diseases, affecting fewer than 200,000 people in the US, more recently, specialty drugs have emerged as the cornerstone of treatment for chronic and complex diseases such as cancer, autoimmune conditions, diabetes, hepatitis C, and HIV/AIDS.
Accuracy is critical because without reliable technologies, wearable monitoring tools will fail to gain physicians’ trust.
