Masimo Launches Enhanced Masimo Patient SafetyNet(TM) System to Help Hospitals Reduce Preventable Deaths on the General Floor
New features expand monitoring capabilities, simplify operation and extend capabilities to cover up to 80 patients per server on up to four floors.
Irvine, CA, September 15, 2009 — Masimo (Nasdaq: MASI), the inventor of Pulse CO-Oximetry™ and Measure-Through Motion and Low-Perfusion pulse oximetry, today introduced a new enhanced version of the Masimo Patient SafetyNet system designed to help hospitals avoid preventable patient deaths and injuries associated with failure to rescue — one of today’s most common medical errors.(1) New features such as an intuitive touch-screen interface and the ability to monitor up to 80 patients simultaneously on four separate floors allow hospitals to noninvasively and remotely monitor more patients, in more care areas, more efficiently, and in more clinical detail — enabling an enhanced level of patient safety when a clinician can’t be at the bedside.
The Masimo Patient SafetyNet remote monitoring and clinician notification system combines the gold standard performance of Masimo SET® pulse oximetry with optional Oridion Microstream® end tidal CO2-based respiration rate monitoring at the point of care and wireless clinician notification via pager to provide an unmatched level of patient safety on general care floors. The system uses IEEE industry standards for connectivity — allowing for more efficient sharing of data across a hospital’s IT platforms and the option of full integration into a hospital’s existing IT infrastructure, providing a lower overall cost of ownership and improved financial benefits.
One of the most common dangers in hospitals today is the risk of death or serious injury caused by medications designed to relieve pain and help keep patients comfortable. Growing concerns over the use of patient-controlled analgesia (PCA) in the post-operative period have caused leading patient safety organizations to institute new recommendations and guidelines to combat the “unexpected and potentially harmful opioid-induced respiratory depression that continues to occur.” According to the latest direction from the Anesthesia Patient Safety Foundation (APSF), these dangers exist because “in most cases, there is inadequate monitoring of oxygenation and/or ventilation.” The APSF further warns hospital clinicians that “intermittent subjective assessments of ventilation or level of consciousness are unreliable predictors of future respiratory depression, even over short time frames” and continuous monitoring of oxygenation via pulse oximetry must be “the routine and not the exception.”(2)
The new Patient SafetyNet system is already having a big impact on both nurses and post-surgical patients for two hospitals involved in limited market release testing. Marilyn Nemerever, R.N., director of Acute Care at Swedish Medical Center in Seattle, where the new system is being used to monitor patients in three separate post-surgical units at three different hospitals from a single central monitoring station, stated, “We love it. ICU beds are in high demand these days and Patient SafetyNet allows us to more closely monitor post-surgical patients in our med-surg units, so we can use our ICU resources more appropriately. Our nurses now have the piece of mind that comes with knowing that Patient SafetyNet is helping watch over their patients if and when they cannot. And our patients are having better outcomes because we can see, as well as respond to changes earlier.”
Clinicians at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center, who found that Patient SafetyNet reduced rescue activations by 65% and ICU transfers by 48% — while in some patients where ICU transfer was avoided, length of stay was also reduced from 5.8 to 3.6 days with an associated cost of care reduction of 30%, have also embraced the capabilities of the new Patient SafetyNet system. George T. Blike, M.D., Medical Director of Patient Safety at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center in Lebanon, New Hampshire, stated; “The new system enhancements allow us to see real-time numerics for each patient at a glance, while the ability to monitor more patients on a single server will enable us to deploy the system across more care areas than before to reduce overall costs of implementation.”
Another significant risk that post-surgical patients face is undetected internal bleeding. The Patient SafetyNet system can also be easily upgraded to Masimo Rainbow SET Pulse CO-Oximetry technology through a simple software upgrade — allowing hospitals to measure a patient’s hemoglobin noninvasively and continuously, which may improve patient safety by providing an earlier indication of undetected internal bleeding and enabling immediate intervention.
Masimo Executive Vice President of Medical Affairs, Michael O’Reilly, MD, stated, “Each year healthy patients admitted for routine procedures become failure to rescue statistics because an adverse event was not recognized in time to save them. The new capabilities in Masimo Patient SafetyNet significantly expand the functionality of a system that has already been proven to help clinicians improve patient outcomes and decrease costs — two things every hospital wants and needs.”
About Masimo
Masimo (NASDAQ: MASI) develops innovative monitoring technologies that significantly improve patient care — helping solve “unsolvable” problems. In 1995, the company debuted Measure-Through Motion and Low-Perfusion pulse oximetry, known as Masimo SET®, which virtually eliminated false alarms and increased pulse oximetry’s ability to detect life-threatening events. More than 100 independent and objective studies demonstrate Masimo SET provides the most reliable SpO2 and pulse rate measurements even under the most challenging clinical conditions, including patient motion and low peripheral perfusion. In 2005, Masimo introduced Masimo Rainbow SET® Pulse CO-Oximetry™, a breakthrough noninvasive blood constituent monitoring platform that can measure many blood constituents that previously required invasive procedures. Masimo Rainbow SET continuously and noninvasively measures total hemoglobin (SpHb™), oxygen content (SpOC(TM)), carboxyhemoglobin (SpCO®), methemoglobin (SpMet®), and PVI™, in addition to oxyhemoglobin (SpO2), pulse rate (PR), and perfusion index (PI), allowing early detection and treatment of potentially life-threatening conditions. Founded in 1989, Masimo has the mission of “Improving Patient Outcomes and Reducing Cost of Care by Taking Noninvasive Monitoring to New Sites and Applications.” Additional information about Masimo and its products may be found at www.masimo.com.