
Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center Evaluation Findings Demonstrate Masimo Patient SafetyNet™ Delivers Improvements in Clinical Outcomes and Patient Safety on General Care Floors
Early results show positive impacts on safety, quality of care, clinician efficiency and nursing satisfaction
Irvine, California – May 28, 2008 – Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center and Masimo (NASDAQ: MASI), the inventor of Pulse CO-Oximetry and Measure-Through-Motion-and-Low-Perfusion pulse oximetry, today announced that initial results of an ongoing clinical evaluation show Masimo Patient SafetyNet with Masimo Rainbow SET Pulse CO-Oximetry provides early warning detection of impending patient deterioration on the general care floor, which helped keep patients safer. Early findings showed a reduction in distress codes, rescue activations, and ICU transfers. Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center (DHMC), the first hospital to deploy the Masimo Patient SafetyNet system, presented its evaluation data and findings to more than 1,500 clinicians at the 4th International Conference on Rapid Response Systems on May 8, 2008 in Toronto, Canada, and the National Patient Safety Foundation (NPSF) Annual Congress on May 15, 2008 in Nashville, TN.
George T. Blike, M.D., Medical Director, Patient Safety, DHMC, stated "The data that we have gathered by continuously monitoring all patients on a post-surgical general care floor since beginning this evaluation in late 2007 confirms what we anticipated—an improvement in prevention and intervention. The Masimo Patient SafetyNet system makes it possible for our clinicians to identify patient distress earlier—preventing codes and rescues—and initiate appropriate intervention more rapidly to improve patient outcomes, recoveries and clinician efficiencies. All of this contributes to a safer general care floor for our patients."
Findings presented by DHMC showed an 80 percent decrease in distress codes and rescue activations and a 50 percent decrease in ICU transfers for Masimo Patient SafetyNet system-monitored patients in a 36-bed post-surgical unit. In addition, data gathered during the three-month evaluation, covering 2,587 total patient days, showed that the Masimo Patient SafetyNet system supported the early identification of patients with sedation or analgesia-induced respiratory depression, cardiac anomalies identified by high and low pulse rate, poor heart rate control, acute bradycardia needing atropine, new onset A-fib, unrecognized obstructive patterns of respiration like sleep apnea, and pulmonary complications such as fat emboli syndrome, pulmonary embolus and edema.
"The bottom line is that the earlier patient distress is discovered and intervention is initiated, the better the recovery will be—enabling patients to get better faster and go home quicker," said Dr. Blike. "The decreases in codes, rescue activations and ICU transfers are crucial indicators that we are catching deteriorations much earlier and that patients are safer because of it. We expect that our continued evaluation efforts will yield more financial and statistical data concerning Patient SafetyNet's impact on length of stays, patient throughput and new diagnosis identifications."
An influx of more acute patients, the growth and use of patient-controlled analgesia, an increasing number of patients with obstructive sleep apnea, and the ongoing clinician shortage are the realities of today's general care floors. As a result, patients on general care floors are at increased risk of un-witnessed adverse physiological events, like respiratory distress or cardiac arrest. If the patient is not monitored reliably using pulse oximetry technology with high specificity and sensitivity, adverse events on the general care floors may result in long-term health complications or death. Only Masimo Rainbow SET Pulse CO-Oximetry technology provides the greatest sensitivity, at 98 percent, and the greatest specificity, at 97 percent, based on independent and objective references that have examined oximeter performance in real clinical environments.
The Masimo Patient SafetyNet system combines the Measure-Through-Motion-and-Low-Perfusion performance of Masimo Rainbow SET Pulse CO-Oximetry technology with wireless clinician alerts via pager to provide a new level of safety to patients on general care floors, where nurse-to-patient ratios preclude the level of direct surveillance required and recommended to preempt adverse events. When physiological parameters are violated, such as arterial blood oxygen saturation or pulse rate, Masimo Patient SafetyNet provides accurate, actionable alarm notification directly to a qualified clinician—enabling immediate notification and early intervention.
While previous attempts at monitoring patients on the general care floors have failed because of excessive false alarms, the advanced technology of Masimo SET pulse oximetry has virtually eliminated false alarms while delivering the most accurate and reliable arterial blood oxygen saturation and pulse rate measurements. Clinically-proven in more than 100 independent and objective studies to have the highest sensitivity and specificity through conditions of motion and low perfusion—the most common source of false alarms with other pulse oximetry technologies—Masimo SET provides the foundational technology for Masimo Rainbow SET Pulse CO-Oximetry.
"Our data shows overall alarm rates of 4.1 per patient per day on our post-surgical general care floor," said Jean Avery, MBA,RN, Clinical Improvement, DHMC. "On an unmonitored patient, many of these alarm conditions would have gone unnoticed."
"One major East Coast hospital that tried to monitor patients continuously on the general care floor before the advent of Masimo SET pulse oximetry experienced about 36,000 alarms per month for 12 beds, which translated to about 96 alarms per patient day," said Jim Welch, Vice President of Patient Safety Initiatives at Masimo. "The high rate of false alarms due to conventional pulse oximetry's limitations made monitoring on the general floor impractical, if not impossible. With just 4 alarms per patient per day at DHMC, Masimo's revolutionary Measure-Through-Motion pulse oximetry finally enables accurate and reliable monitoring on general care floors."
Also, as part of the evaluation, DHMC surveyed nursing staff in the unit equipped with Masimo Patient SafetyNet and found that they were overwhelmingly satisfied with the system. When asked to assess their feelings toward the new surveillance system, the unit's nursing staff "strongly agreed" that the ability to provide surveillance has added benefit in providing safe care to patients. In addition, the nursing staff indicated that they would "definitely" want a friend or relative needing inpatient care to come to the unit equipped with a surveillance monitoring system..
"Our nurses are discovering patients in need of attention, much sooner than before," stated Nancy Karon, BSN, RN, Clinical Coordinator, DHMC. "Patient SafetyNet has improved patient care with high levels of nurse satisfaction because they know they are able to deliver the best possible quality of care to their general care floor patients."
Joe E. Kiani, Chairman and CEO of Masimo, stated "Quite simply, we developed Masimo Patient SafetyNet to help clinicians save lives and improve patient outcomes. The empirical and statistical data being gathered through Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center's evaluations are providing the necessary details that demonstrate how Masimo's Measure-Through-Motion pulse oximetry technology along with the Patient SafetyNet system are impacting critical patient safety benchmarks, such as the number of sentinel events, codes, rapid response team activations and ICU transfers. Ranked as one of the top academic medical centers in the U.S. and named as one of the nation's most wired medical centers by Hospitals and Health Networks magazine, DHMC was the ideal pilot installation for Masimo Patient SafetyNet. These findings support the necessity and value of Masimo Patient SafetyNet on general care floors."
A study published in the Journal of Critical Care Medicine suggests that there are approximately 820,000 unmonitored beds in non-critical care settings in the U.S.
Contact:
Dana Banks
Masimo Corporation
949-297-7348
