Hospitals and healthcare facilities moving towards meaningful use certification are looking for anything that can help them achieve this goal.

It’s especially important for these institutions to acquire technologies and products that can be integrated easily into hospitals’ electronic health records (EHRs) systems. Any wireless technologies that are interoperable with EHRs can help healthcare facilities obtain meaningful use certification.

The 2009 healthcare law included the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act (HITECH), which provides financial incentives to physicians and other healthcare stakeholders who adopt EHRs, according to allscripts.com.

HITECH requires that healthcare facilities adopting EHRs demonstrate “Meaningful Use.” This requirement mandates that, in order to be eligible for the financial incentives awarded to participating practices, certain criteria must be met to be certfied as achieving meaningful use, according to the Web site.

North Kansas City Hospital (NKCH) faced the challenge of ensuring that patient information like vital signs was not lost, transcribed incorrectly or attributed to the incorrect patient in the process of collecting vital signs data and incorporating this information into patient medical records. So the hospital turned to Philips’ SureSigns VS3 patient monitor, which is interoperable with a range of different EHRs, according to the company. 

Philips’ SureSigns VS3 is used in general wards, where monitors are used to periodically check patients’ vital signs as a “spot-check monitor,” and also for tracking simple physiological symptoms of patients who undergo day surgery or other non-critical procedures. SureSigns VS3 transmits patients’ vital signs data like body temperature and heart rate and then integrates this information into EHRs, saving time and reducing errors, according to the company.

NKCH’s previous system was not wireless, so adopting Philips’ solution, which is compatible with many different EHRs, allowed the hospital a greater ability to wirelessly integrate its many different platforms. 

Barnes-Jewish Hospital in St. Louis is currently undergoing a feasibility study of a similar clinical warning system that uses wireless sensors to track the vital signs of at-risk patients, according to  Diana Lutz, Washington University in St. Louis. When the full system is in place, sensors will take blood oxygenation and heart-rate readings from at-risk patients once or twice a minute, according to Lutz’s story. The data will then be transmitted to a base station, where it will be combined with other data in patients’ EHRs, such as lab test results, while “the incoming vital signs and data in the medical record will be continually scrutinized by a machine-learning algorithm looking for signs of clinical deterioration,” Lutz writes. If deterioration is detected, the machine alerts a nurse.

Nurses using Philips’ VS3 report that they are able to spend more time with their patients, and feel more confident that their patients’ medical records are more accurate and complete – leading to better overall care, according to Michelle Sullivan, coordinator for Clinical Informatics at North Kansas Hospital.

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