This article is from in the December 2007 issue of DOTmed Business News. A list of registered users that provide sales & service can be found at the end.

In the past five years, traditional, electronically controlled hospital beds underwent a metamorphosis. No longer simply a place of rest, today hospital beds play an integral part in patient care, its mattress, frame and sidebars loaded with software tracking a patient's status, weight, movement and safety, even delivering certain therapeutic care. Driven by patient safety issues, an ongoing
nursing shortage, and a need for more efficient reimbursement, hospital beds are now medically and economically alert.


"Our beds are not just a frame and a motor," says Andy Rieth, VP/investor relations, global branding & communications, Hillenbrand Industries. "We now have surfaces and software that can communicate and monitor a patient, can deliver various therapies such as pulmonary, cancer, and others, while delivering data to a hospital's mainframe computer where it can be turned into actionable treatment from care managers and clinical consultants."

Hill-Rom, his company's hospital bed division, is widely recognized as the industry leader, and has been in the hospital bed business for over 75 years. Stryker Medical Equipment, the industry's second largest hospital bed competitor, while larger in scale as an overall medical equipment company, has a smaller bed division which, for the past 15 years, has been challenging Hill-Rom's dominance.

According to MD Buyline Intelligence Reports monitoring the medical field, Indiana-based Hill-Rom currently has 65 percent of market share with Michigan-based Stryker Medical 35 percent (although Stryker executives say that number's higher.)




These two major vendors provide hospitals and medical centers with the most-requested bed needs: General Patient and Birthing Beds.

General Patient beds consist of critical care and medical/ surgical beds. Critical Care Beds include varying models and surfaces found in Intensive Care Units and Critical Care Units. Med/Surg Beds are the standard beds found on patient floors outside the ICU. Birthing Beds are part of a hospital's maternity suite where mothers labor, deliver and recover in the same bed.

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