Integra Systems, Inc. in cooperation with collaborators has recently responded to a forward looking RFP surrounding a house-wide replacement of patient monitoring. This RFP demonstrates high lights and trends that are emerging of which are changing the dynamics of this industry.
1. Patient monitoring has pretty much become commoditized. For example there are no real innovative physiological signals that are going to change the dynamics of the industry. Everyone does EKG, NIBP, invasive blood pressure monitoring, temperature, respiration, and/or Sp02 or EtCo2. If they did not do this well in a reliable fashion, they would have not received a FDA 510K approval.
2. The need to provide “house wide” monitoring on demand versus the traditional patient monitoring of sub critical and “step down” that will provide more flexibility to monitoring patients and lessen ER diversions. Will drive down costs and lessen risk.
3. WMTS…unless regulation changes, is on a slow death spiral as the financial savings and proven 802.11 patient monitoring deployments on a global basis since 2006 just make continued in roads in 2013.
4. The emerging need to integrate patient monitoring into the EMR in a safe and cost effective way which also lends itself to a IP centric design versus proprietary.
5. Alarm management has come front and center to ensure optimal clinician notification of changing events and alerts in a timely fashion.
6. Traditional local patient monitoring central stations in de-centralized units are moving forward toward remotely centralized monitoring or “war room” environments. This saves overall costs and allows better management of alarms and alerts when the proper designed enterprise is deployed.
7. The requirement for remote facility monitoring expertise.
8. The need to to apply cross functional design criteria to ensure a resilent enterprise platform.
With all the changes going on; there is a need to now look strategically at the technology that is coupled to this investment and acquisition process. As evidenced by the received RFP (Request for Proposal); there does seem to be a lot of confusion in this space. Clients are struggling to to have objective analysis and street experience to support their technology investments.
