Continuous Monitoring Wearable Device Enables Early Detection of Patient Deterioration

By HospiMedica International staff writers
Posted on 02 Dec 2024

Image: The BioButton multi-patient wearable and biodashboard system for continuous patient monitoring has received FDA clearance (Photo courtesy of BioIntelliSense)

A continuous patient monitoring system provides a rechargeable, reusable solution for automating the collection of vital signs across various medical settings, including surgical units, specialty care areas, emergency departments, and even hospital-level care at home.

BioIntelliSense’s (Denver, CO, USA) rechargeable and reusable FDA-cleared BioButton Multi-Patient wearable along with BioDashboard clinical intelligence system empowers clinicians to detect significant changes in physiologic trends, enabling earlier interventions and improved patient outcomes. The BioButton is a multi-parameter monitoring device placed on a patient’s upper left chest upon hospital admission. This device’s extensive set of leading indicators helps identify adverse trends early, improving safety and effectiveness in patient monitoring, from the hospital to home care. The BioDashboard system uses data-driven exception management to provide automated, personalized notifications, allowing a single clinician to monitor hundreds of patients simultaneously via a configurable dashboard view, thus enabling proactive clinical decision-making.

The BioIntelliSense inpatient monitoring solution combines the BioButton wearables, charging stations, BioHub Wi-Fi gateways, BioCloud data analytics, and the BioDashboard system. This integrated approach offers a scalable model for continuous care, enhancing patient safety and improving clinical workflow by reducing the time spent on manual tasks like spot-checking vital sign measurements and documentation. This time-saving allows healthcare resources to be more effectively allocated to patients needing hands-on care. Furthermore, BioDashboard’s exception management system ensures minimal notification rates (<1 per patient per day) while maintaining high clinician engagement (99.71%), improving response times, minimizing alert fatigue, and ultimately enhancing overall patient care.

A recent large-scale study involving nearly 12,000 hospitalized patients showed that continuous, multi-parameter vital sign monitoring with the BioIntelliSense BioButton significantly improved patient outcomes. Published in the Journal of Clinical Medicine, the study, conducted over 15 months in U.S. medical-surgical units, found that the BioButton tracked vital signs like heart rate, respiratory rate, skin temperature, and activity levels, collecting up to 1,440 measurements per patient each day. In total, more than 651,000 patient-hours of data were captured, far surpassing the data obtained with traditional manual spot-checking methods. The data was securely transmitted via a BioHub Wi-Fi gateway to the BioCloud for analysis, where algorithms and rule-based notifications alerted healthcare providers to adverse vital sign trends and early signs of deterioration, on average 14.8 hours before the onset of noticeable symptoms. The results demonstrated a reduction in patient length of stay, lower alert notification rates, early clinical intervention in deterioration events, and the transformative potential of wearable medical monitoring and algorithmic analytics to enhance patient care.

“The study underscores the value of implementing continuous monitoring wearable technology, combined with algorithmic-based data analytics, in general care areas of the hospital to automate vital sign collection and to deliver clinical intelligence for actionable decision making,” said James Mault, MD, CEO and Founder of BioIntelliSense. “The BioButton system's ability to deliver timely and accurate notifications enables earlier detection of clinical deterioration and plays a critical role in proactively managing a patient’s health outcomes.”

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