Covidien and GE Healthcare, global providers of patient monitoring and respiratory care devices, have announced they will cooperate in a five-year agreement to use Covidien measurement technologies in GE Healthcare patient monitors to keep track of patients’ vital signs and get the immediate attention of clinicians if there’s any deterioration in condition.
GE Healthcare monitors record pulse, oxygen levels, blood pressure, heart rhythym and even the effects of anesthetics and sedatives on the brain. Accurately measuring these vital signs is crucial when caring for very ill patients. Any change can be a matter of life and death if not responded to promptly. Monitors now make that not even a possibility.
These monitor health care providers' immediate readings of exactly how a patient is doing, helping them determine if different treatment is needed, right at the point of care.
"GE Healthcare is committed to making a broad range of parameter measurements available on our powerful monitoring technology, including GE's own SpO2 technology," Matthias Weber, general manager, monitoring solutions at GE Healthcare, said in the announcement. "Leveraging our 100-year history of designing life-critical devices, we are focused on delivering innovative clinical measurement technology. Such advances have the potential to support improved care, quality, and patient safety."
Most recall the days when respirators were big clunky machines that took up half the room, and all the silence in it, too, hissing and humming and thumping. But GE’s Nellcor Respiratory Function portfolio, which includes Nellcor pulse oximetry with OxiMax technology, and the BIS Brain Monitoring system – now available on many GE Healthcare patient monitors – are helping people to be cared for in ways that couldn’t even have been imagined 10, maybe even five years ago.
Did you know the first monitor ever was used in 1874 when a doctor tried to measure the blood saturation in a hand? In 1918, a Copenhagen physician developed quantitative oximetry, the precursor to the technology used in some of GE’s healthcare products.
GE’s CARESCAPE Monitor B850 and CARESCAPE Monitor B650 use an advanced form of this type of technology to allow clinicians to manage patients with up-to-the-second data about oxygen saturation, heart rate, blood pressure and other vital signs, then sound alarms when intervention is required.
Covidien’s solution includes an open monitoring architecture, combining streams of patient data at the point of care. GE officials report that the CARESCAPE Monitor B850, which now provides access to Covidien measurements, allows information to flow in two directions between the monitor and hospital information systems, such as electronic medical records, and electrocardiogram measurements, without requiring a separate monitor, providing information for physicians that can guide their decisions and improve care.
A Covidien executive said these types of monitors are so crucial because they can pick up any change in vital signs, alerting healthcare staff to the need for intervention in time to prevent a patient’s downturn.
"The advanced parameter portfolio from Covidien, coupled with GE Healthcare's patient monitors, supports clinicians in detecting subtle but critical variations in a patient's status," said Robert J. White, president of Covidien respiratory and monitoring solutions. "By delivering the full picture of a patient's physiological status, patient safety and positive outcomes can beadvanced."
Edited by
Braden Becker
