How BD wants to advance noninvasive continuous patient monitoring

Tim Patz envisions a future where continuous monitoring follows the patient “from admission or the point of surgery, all the way to discharge.”

Becton, Dickinson and Co. (BD), where Patz is worldwide president of the Advanced Patient Monitoring business, is one step closer to that future after developing a platform enabling noninvasive continuous blood pressure monitoring, and it’s more accurate than the traditional arm cuff.

BD recently launched the HemoSphere Stream Module to deliver “real-time, beat-to-beat arterial waveform data from a noninvasive finger cuff.” The system noninvasively tracks hemodynamic changes through the VitaWave Plus finger cuff, eliminating the need for an arterial line.

In a Medical Design & Outsourcing interview, Patz explained the innovation behind HemoSphere Stream and how BD recognized the area for opportunity.

The following has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

MDO: What is BD’s Advanced Patient Monitoring team working on?

Patz: “Big picture, what we do is help clinicians identify what’s going on with the patient. A lot of our patients are either sick in the ICU or they’re under anesthesia in the operating room. Whether it’s hemodynamics or advanced physiology, we provide information to clinicians so they can get patients through this care pathway faster. The information helps you make treatment decisions. The treatment decisions then impact the care. We’re a very patient-focused group. Ultimately, our endgame is to get information to clinicians and improve patient outcomes. Then we celebrate those patients, we get great patient stories and we have a lot of culture built around that.”

What’s so innovative about the Hemosphere Stream Module?

Patz: “Two things in my mind. No. 1 is when we go to primary care, it’s great to have a blood pressure cuff give you a measurement. But when you’re in that acute phase, and you’re in the hospital, you really need continuous monitoring. If you’re sick enough to be admitted to the hospital, then you should have information coming on a beat-by-beat, second-by-second basis so that you get information back to your clinical care provider.

“The second piece is whether you’re in an emergency room bed, general ward or the operating room, there are different monitors in all these different rooms. Sometimes you don’t have access to the monitoring that’s required to have that high level of care. Stream is unique because it’ll plug into a wide range of compatible bedside monitors, across different brands and configurations, just via cable. It doesn’t require you to have any special connections. Stream is really using the monitoring that exists within any care space. It gives you that continuous need, but also that ability to be agile in the hospital environment you’re in.”

When did you realize a technology like this was necessary?

Patz: “When you see the data from traditional blood pressure monitoring, it’s not great. In general, the arm cuff in an acute care patient has probably plus or minus 30% [margin of error/bias], so you can imagine.

“Our core principle is that we provide information that inevitably will lead to better treatment. If you’re starting with the basis that the information a physician or nurse is getting is 30% off, you have a risk to patients that you could be making a treatment decision that actually is not in line with the numbers that are really happening to those patients. … This is widely published within different journals, these error rates.

“We are not trying to bash the technology, but it is a technology that is close to 40, 50 years old. Arm cuff technology is one of the oldest technologies in our space. I think it’s a natural evolution that these products should evolve over time.”

Read the second part of this interview here, and we’ll have more soon at Medical Design & Outsourcing. Subscribe to our free newsletter so you don’t miss it.