A leading clinician of a top UK children’s hospital believes wireless monitoring is changing the face of healthcare.
Dr Heather Duncan, intensive care consultation and lead of the RAPID (Real-time Adaptive and Predictive Indicator of Deterioration) project at the Birmingham Women's and Children's NHS Foundation Trust says this new wireless technology is “reshaping the future of healthcare for both patients and healthcare professionals” and “offering so many benefits to everyone”.
In an article featured in the Clinical Services Journal, she says: “Wireless technology is enabling healthcare providers to monitor patients in real-time and continuously, while being able to act more quickly on critical patient data. Now, for the first time ever, clinicians can look at each patient’s vital signs and see how they change over a longer period of time.”
Dr Duncan is currently leading the RAPID project in which she is using the Patient Status Engine, a CE marked, Class IIa continuous monitoring platform, and the Lifetouch wearable patch sensor, to take wireless continuous observations from patients and then use this data to understand, in real-time, what is normal for each patient and to detect the changing patterns in their physiology.
“This continuous monitoring allows deterioration to be recognised, triggering an alert and provoking timely intervention to prevent patients suffering further deterioration and death,” she says. “This is the first time this technology has been used anywhere in the world.”
Since starting the project, doctors and nurses in the hospital can now analyse and model large volumes of data and focus on a more proactive care delivery model rather than a reactive one.
Dr Duncan says the benefits of using this technology are vast:
“Looking to the future, I think for children, wireless monitoring is the way forward,” she says. “It will have wide applications across the NHS and healthcare globally and could help save money currently spent on expensive monitors. This type of technology is changing the face of healthcare as we know it.”
The PSE, which is in hospitals globally, has monitored more than 1,200 patients at the Birmingham Women's and Children's NHS Foundation Trust in the last 18 months.
Please download the full article in the Clinical Services Journal.