SEATTLE – Hospitals using a patient monitoring system developed by Masimo are reporting a decrease in preventable patient deaths and injuries.

The Irvine, Calif.-based company's Patient SafetyNet is designed to reduce the percentage of patient deaths and injuries incurred in the hospital due to inefficient or lack of medical care. The system combines remote monitoring and clinical notification capabilities to allow for noninvasive supervision of patients at a healthcare facility.

Masimo officials sat the system, which can monitor as many as 80 patients at a time, provides clinicians with critical details that lead to increased quality of care.

“ICU beds are in high demand these days, and Patient SafetyNet allows us to more closely monitor post-surgical patients in our med-surg units, so we can use our ICU resources more appropriately,” said Marilyn Nemerever, director of acute care at Swedish Medical Center in Seattle, where the system is being used to monitor patients in three separate post-surgical units at three different hospitals from one monitoring station. “Our patients are having better outcomes because we can see, as well as respond to, changes earlier."

Swedish Medical officials say the Patient SafetyNet allows clinicians to be more informed of patient situations, as well as improving communications with different IT platforms and the hospital's existing infrastructure. As an example, Swedish Medical uses the system to evaluate pain medication, a key component in situations which cause preventable deaths or injuries.

At the Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center in lebanon, N.H., clinicians are using Patient SafetyNet to monitor and reduce rescue activations. Officials have estimated that since deployment, the system has reduced activation by 65 percent, while the number of ICU transfers has declined by an estimated 48 percent, and some transfers have been avoided. In addition, patient length-of-stay was reduced from 5.8 days to 3.6 days, with a 30 percent reduction in cost of care.

"The new system enhancements allow us to see real-time numerics for each patient at a glance, while the ability to monitor more patients on a single server will enable us to deploy the system across more care areas than before to reduce overall costs of implementation," said George T. Blike, MD, the hospital's medical director of patient safety.

Masimo officials say the Patient SafetyNet can be upgraded with the company's Rainbow SET Pulse CO-Oximetry technology, allowing officials to noninvesively monitor a patient's hemoglobin and detect internal bleeding.