Hospital Buyer

Medical Connectivity Consulting offers interesting thoughts on where medical devices such as primary and secondary alarm systems could evolve to provide better bang for the buck. The author underlines how manufacturers are stretched between the obvious need in healthcare for the kind of commoditization and lower prices traditionally brought by the mainstream IT industry, and the higher costs and longer time to market associated with the legal and technical complexities and constraints attached to making and marketing a medical device.

Looking into the issue of alarm systems specifically, the challenge is to deliver them in a way that both frees up time for nurses and doctors and does not drown them in counter-productive paged false positives that lead to “alarm fatigue” at risk of either ignoring some genuine alarms, or wasting a lot of time on those false positives. Human expertise needs to sit between automated alarm systems and caregivers, hence the appearance of centralized “war rooms” that handle incoming alerts and dispatch only those that matter to the field. Then comes this exciting, if probably quite remote, “fantasy”:

[M]edical devices on a nursing unit (all types, all vendors) will interoperate with a third party server that replaces multiple proprietary servers/central stations. Caregivers will carry alarm management devices that also provide wireless voice communications, with alerts and alarms in text and graphics (waveforms). Anyone wishing to see retrospective or “full disclosure” data will go to any PC in the hospital with a browser and pull it up. High availability medical device servers will serve up waveforms - retrospective and near real time - to EMRs. Devices will interoperate with clinical information systems setting device parameters based on physician orders - without human intervention - and generate clinical alerts (and maybe even life saving interventions at the medical device) by combining the many things the CIS knows about the patient (the patient’s diagnosis, latest lab values, etc.) with what the medical devices connected to that patient know. [….] In my fantasy it’s a patient centric world with no artificial barriers resulting from the product portfolios or installed base of the device vendors.”

Corporate IT vendors realized through the nineties that their customers expected them to collaborate even among fierce competitors, and they have increasingly obliged - if grungingly - to this pressure, thus making integration easier, faster, cheaper with a lot less complexity and application isolation as a result. Similar system-wide thinking with pieces from different manufacturers fitting into a general architecture needs to make its way in the healthcare world without incurring very expensive integration costs.

February 2, 2006 Related topics: Standards, Monitoring, IT & software