From the May 2015 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine


Philips Healthcare has a range of cableless, wearable sensors on the market including the Philips Mobile CL noninvasive blood pressure cuffs, SpO2 sensors and respiration accessories. When they are used in conjunction with the Philips Cableless Measurement pods, they gather vital sign data as the patient moves throughout the hospital.

“Monitoring is becoming more available and more ubiquitous,” says Dr. Joseph Frassica, vice president and chief medical informatics officer and chief technology officer of Philips Healthcare. “We realize that moving monitors that are geared to and calibrated for the very sick patient in the ICU to lower-acuity settings is probably not the best strategy for health care systems because those monitors that provide enough vigilance for a very sick patient can create quite a bit of noise in a low-acuity setting.”


The cableless sensors are part of Philips IntelliVue Guardian Solutions, which utilizes the information from the sensors to generate acuity scoring so that nurses and physicians can be alerted when a patient is deteriorating. “Guardian automates that acuity scoring so that it happens in real time as the measurements are taken,” says Frassica. “It can potentially activate rapid response teams where they’re needed in a much more efficient way.”

A mix of excitement and skepticism
When it comes to these technologies, physicians have mixed emotions. They’re excited because they see the potential but also skeptical because of the fear that it may interfere with the doctor-patient relationship. Dr. Steven Steinhubl, director of digital medicine at Scripps Health, has encountered a few physicians in the field who express hostility toward the outpatient wearables.

“The hostility isn’t directed toward the technology itself,” he says. “There is the idea that this technology is going to take away the doctor-patient relationship even more.” They think the patient isn’t going to come into the office to discuss their health because they can now remotely send them the wearable information. But Steinhubl tries to explain to them that when well incorporated, these technologies can actually improve that relationship because patients still need a 45 minute office visit with an expert diagnostician and educator who can understand and synthesize all of the complicated wearable data.

Physicians are also concerned about the exorbitant amount of information the wearables produce. “Now they can have this ongoing, constant record over a period of time to learn a lot more about what’s going on with that patient versus just a snapshot when they come into the see them,” says Eric Selvik, vice president of marketing at Vital Connect. “But they are also a little bit wary because it’s a lot of data and they can be a little oversaturated.”

May 2015 Magazine

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