Isansys Lifecare Limited, the provider of complete real-time physiological patient data services and systems, announced the introduction of its Patient Status Engine™ - the first cloud-based patient digitization and analytic solution for monitoring and predicting the present and future clinical status of patients anytime, anywhere. The introduction of the Patient Status Engine provides the platform for Isansys' "Vitals as a Service™" solution, which is now offered for priority beta deployments in hospitals and other healthcare facilities.
The Patient Status Engine is a complete end-to-end system that integrates wireless body-worn sensors with a cloud-based HIPAA/HL7 compliant Electronic Health Record (EHR), to transform real-time and historical continuous vital sign data into clinical status indicators and prediction tools. With the availability of these new cloud-based indicators and tools, healthcare providers can be notified of any change in a patient's health status as it happens or predict changes that may happen in the future. This can - more effectively and affordably than ever before - address issues of in-hospital patient safety and avoidable deteriorations and significantly reduce hospital admission times. The Patient Status Engine allows healthcare providers to continue 24/7 surveillance of patients even after they have been discharged from hospital. As a networked and cloud-based system, patients and clinicians may be located anywhere. A further benefit is that a quantified record of a patient's physiological status is established that can be used for audit purposes or to determine the effectiveness and quality of care.
Last month, Isansys announced CE certification for its LifeTouch Patient Surveillance System, comprising the LifeTouch HRV011 intelligent body-worn wireless sensor and associated Patient Gateway - the world's first cloud-ready medical device of its kind, and the first to be certified as a Class IIa medical device under the European Medical Device Directive (MDD). Today's Patient Status Engine launch is the extension of the LifeTouch System into the clinical healthcare cloud. The LifeTouch HRV011 sensor performs a key patient digitisation function within the Patient Status Engine, and together with other devices allows healthcare providers to collect five vital signs continuously, wirelessly and in real-time - Heart Rate (HR), Respiration Rate (RR), Blood Pressure (BP), Pulse Oximetry (SpO2), and Temperature (T). The system also analyses the ECG signals to provide the essential data for Heart Rate Variability (HRV) techniques and methods. Other sensors such as accelerometers, weight scales and blood glucose sensors can be easily added to the network.
The data from the body worn sensors is transmitted via a patient gateway and LAN or WAN to the cloud-based EHR, which offers a powerful transactional interface to allow multiple and simple configurability and connectivity of incoming and outgoing data. The vital sign data continuously updates the EHR to provide dynamic charting, and is aggregated in the EHR where “apps” run to provide interpreted data and other information to nurses and clinicians (and, eventually, to patients and monitored individuals themselves). A typical "app" is a predictive early warning scores (EWS) algorithm that can be proprietary to the customer or licensed from a third party. The Patient Status Engine is completely scalable. It can either run in a closed cloud allowing a single hospital, regional healthcare organization or HMO to maintain control over patient data; or it can run in a secure large cloud, for instance as a managed service across a whole country. The aggregated and de-personalised data in the database quickly builds into highly valuable Big Data sets for metadata analytics.
The EHR platform is being provided by Tolven Corp., developers of a unique open source solution for secure healthcare and life science information. By using an open source model, the Tolven platform provides a low cost and very robust approach that challenges many current paradigms in healthcare IT that rely on proprietary and expensive software. The network architecture, integration with the Tolven platform and the secure server hosting has been achieved in collaboration with Fujitsu. Fujitsu's plans for a managed healthcare data service comprising secure servers, the Tolven platform and end-to-end connectivity provide global scalability and security for the Isansys Patient Status Engine.
Commenting on the announcement, Isansys Lifecare CEO Keith Errey said: "This is a clear demonstration of the power of collaboration, the advantages of the open source approach, and the benefits that can now be realised for patients and healthcare providers around the world. We are very pleased to be working with such great teams at Tolven and Fujitsu. Together, we can really change the game and vastly reduce the costs for healthcare payers by combining the open source Tolven platform, Fujitsu's open, but highly secure, managed service model and our own low cost, technology-agnostic systems and services. With such outstanding supporting platform technologies, we are delighted to offer Isansys' Vitals as a Service solution for beta deployment to visionary healthcare providers worldwide."
Rebecca Weir, Isansys Director of Business Development added: "This is a great moment for us. The complete end-to-end system - our Patient Status Engine - demonstrates our commitment to providing the latest technologies and devices to our customers in ways that invert many of the current business models in healthcare, and allow us to offer the benefits of the Patient Status Engine - significantly improved outcomes for patients and cost reductions for healthcare providers - in a simple, affordable service model. We really believe that this will have a fundamental and permanent impact on the way healthcare is structured and practised in the future."
About Isansys Lifecare Limited
Isansys Lifecare is a new generation healthcare company that provides patient surveillance and monitoring services built on an innovative, low cost and scalable platform
We work with leading healthcare professionals, institutes and policy organisations operating in a wide range of healthcare settings, who want to employ new patient monitoring technologies and methods to improve patient outcomes and reduce costs.
Isansys' 'Vitals as a Service'TM clinical solution provides continuous real-time information for automated patient surveillance, for early warning scores and track and trigger indicators, and for predicting adverse events. Through its low cost and highly scalable architecture, the LifeTouch-based system offers the opportunity for continuous surveillance of all patients regardless of whether they are in hospital, other care facilities, or at home. For the first time, healthcare providers can not only cost-effectively improve patient safety and enhance clinical outcomes, but also massively reduce costs associated with avoidable patient deterioration, medical errors, readmissions to intensive care wards, and admissions (and readmissions) to hospital.
About Continuous Patient Physiological Monitoring
It is well documented that patients who deteriorate and require admission to critical care or who suffer cardiac arrest, or many other adverse conditions, have abnormalities that are detectable by physiological observations well in advance. Continuous (or nearly continuous) monitoring of multiple vital signs provides the fundamental input for improved patient outcomes and reduced overall costs. In the US alone, remote patient monitoring devices are forecast to reduce healthcare costs by nearly $200 billion during the next 25 years, if more widely used by patients with certain chronic diseases (Source: Center for Technology and Aging Report, May 2010).
About Fujitsu
Fujitsu is a leading provider of IT-based business solutions for the global marketplace. With approximately 175,000 employees supporting customers in 70 countries, Fujitsu combines a worldwide corps of systems and services experts with highly reliable computing and communications products and advanced microelectronics to deliver added value to customers. Headquartered in Tokyo, Fujitsu Limited (TSE:6702) reported consolidated revenues of 4.6 trillion yen (US$47 billion) for the fiscal year ended March 31, 2009.
About Tolven
Tolven based applications are in use in multiple sites in Europe, North America and Asia. The applications incorporate workflow, healthcare information standards, rules, and terminology management, thereby driving the evolution of complete solutions for comprehensive healthcare data collection, secure data storage, and semantic re-use of that data. The Tolven Platform is able to enforce a spectrum of patient consent functionality that fulfills compliance with existing and evolving standards for security and privacy across the globe. The Tolven electronic health record application set has achieved "complete" certification, for both inpatient and physician office venues, from the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology of the United States Department of Health and Human Services.
Tolven's architecture facilitates secure exchange of both identified and de-identified clinical information among all relevant stakeholders (patients, clinicians, providers, insurers, pharmacies and researchers). The incorporation of JBoss Rules allows clinical decision support and analytical activities such as quality assurance reporting, epidemiology and clinical research to occur with minimal effort. The adaptive nature of the Tolven Platform has proven to be essential for gaining acceptance in areas where information technology has traditionally been inflexible, expensive to customize and cumbersome.