This article is from in the February 2008 issue of DOTmed Business News. A list of registered users that provide sales & service can be found at the end.

In the world of medical mysteries, monitors and other portable or fixed diagnostic cardiography systems serve as hard-working detectives, carefully gathering and analyzing patient data, in real time and after the fact. Whether a Phillips IntelliVue patient monitor checking vital signs, a GE Holter or ECG seeking heart arrhythmias, or a Quinton Stress Monitor looking for possible arterial blockage, monitors measure and evaluate critical body functions, allowing physicians to better diagnose and treat everything from high blood pressure to cardiac arrest.

Phillips Cardiography Systems and GE Healthcare Diagnostic ECGs are generally considered the top two companies for patient monitoring systems. However, their expertise is pricey and Japanese (Nihon Kohden), Chinese (Mindray), and other global companies such as Welch Allyn and Schiller are coming forward with either low-end, or just lower priced, monitors making it "tough to compete," according to some monitor dealers who sell both new and re-furbished equipment.
For Scott Burke, however, GM/GE Healthcare ECG, his company's "heritage of research in ECG algorithms, dating back to its purchase of Marquette in 1998," clearly warrants its Number One position, globally, in resting ECG/EKG quality.

"Hands down, we are Number One," Burke says, insisting that while UK-based GE Healthcare is a global company with a "very strong presence" in Asia and the Middle East, poorly-made foreign monitors can sacrifice quality for cost.

"You're not just looking at cost, but the depth of research," he adds. "There are different classes of equipment that fit certain price ranges. For GE, we can provide ECG's from $9500 to $20,000, depending on the ruggedness of the equipment and the number of special features. But our resting ECG's are based on solid, proprietary and continual research, data, and science."

Pat Dorsey, global product manager for GE Healthcare's Holter Monitor System, notes that GE's legacy of research goes back even further in this area, to the later 1970s.

"Not only do we have clinical excellence in how we detect and measure algorithms," Dorsey says, but we have products that measure three levels of disease: measuring anthemia, measuring diminished blood flow, and, since the 2006, new Holter software that can give a clinician a look at a patient's future risk of sudden cardiac death, which we introduced at the Heart Rhythm Society. This is huge for us."

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