From the May 2015 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine


When she was working as a nurse in an ICU about ten years ago, she would have to document full blood pressure, heart rate, and cardiac output every 15 minutes, and sometimes even every five minutes, and then enter all of it into the EMR. “That’s a lot of time for data entry, but now with device integration, it can be integrated with the nurse call system, the IV pumps, the ventilators and everything can then be documented in the EMR,” she says. “It has to be validated by whoever is documenting, but it goes in there and you’re not having to double enter and waste a lot of time.”

Welch Allyn released its new Welch Allyn Connex Spot Monitor (CSM) on March 30, which can wirelessly transmit information into the EMR both in a hospital and office setting. “Many customers today have our products out there that aren’t connected to their EMR, and this product is designed with connectivity in mind to bridge the gap for that,” says Garrison Gomez, senior director of integrated solutions and diagnostic cardiology at Welch Allyn.


Gomez claims that this is the only patient monitor on the market that goes across both the hospital and office setting. They have done interoperability testing with EMR partners ahead of its launch and Cerner and Epic are now integrated with the monitor. The next big trend coming down the pike is having it so patient monitors can communicate with other devices. “If you could get the data from these different devices and they could talk to each other, you could utilize the data to help provide better care in real time,” says Jeff Moffatt, senior marketing manager for monitoring and IT systems at Draeger.

End Tidal CO2 monitoring is now becoming a requirement in the med-surg area because of the realization that postoperative pain management patients need to be monitored carefully in order to prevent an overdose.

If a patient-controlled analgesia pump (PCA) and an End Tidal CO2 monitor could communicate with each other, the monitor could alert the PCA pump if the patient’s respiratory status is being suppressed and automatically lock the patient out, preventing them from administering any more dosages.

Draeger is one of the leaders in this area with the introduction of its Smart Device Connect (SDC), which is an open protocol. SDC is not intended to be proprietary—the idea is for medical device manufacturers to adopt these open standards so a range of different devices can communicate.

“The idea of having these closed and open loop functionalities have really taken interoperability to the ultimate level,” says Moffatt. “But at its basic level, the SDC is going to allow devices to talk to each other so you can do things like share alarm data and vital sign information and have more interoperable remote control.”

May 2015 Magazine

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