Sotera Wireless To Highlight Company's Alarm Management Agenda At 2014 AAMI Conference

SAN DIEGO, May 28, 2014 /PRNewswire/ -- Sotera^® Wireless today announced that James Welch, Senior Vice President Patient Safety, Quality Systems, Clinical and Regulatory Affairs and a pioneer in the development of patient monitoring systems, will lead an educational session at the upcoming Association for the Advancement of Medical Innovation (AAMI) 2014 conference in Philadelphia. Welch, who will moderate the session titled "Transforming Care in Non-ICU Settings through Disruptive Continuous Monitoring" during an open-invite breakfast symposium on June 2 at 7 a.m. eastern daylight time, intends to highlight the patient safety benefits of continuous patient monitoring technology emphasizing efforts to align with the Joint Commission's drive to manage alarm hazards in healthcare facilities.

In December 2013, the Joint Commission issued a report warning that clinical alarms can compromise patient safety if improperly managed. The Commission's 2014 National Patient Safety Goal (NPSG) for Alarm System Safety aims to heighten awareness of the risks associated with clinical alarms and introduces requirements to mitigate those risks.

"Both the Joint Commission and the ECRI Institute have assigned top priority to alarm hazards, based on their association with serious patient harm," said Welch. "We are proactively involved in efforts to improve patient safety by ensuring that continuous monitoring technology can be successfully implemented in a way that complies with the Joint Commission National Patient Safety Goal around alarm management."

To help in achieving that goal, Sotera is a sponsor of the newly-formed National Coalition for Alarm Management Safety, developed and chaired by the AAMI Foundation / HTSI (Healthcare Technology Safety Institute). Welch and Dr. Gunnar Trommer, Sotera's Vice President of Marketing, are Sotera's representatives and attended the recent inaugural meeting of the National Coalition. This meeting brought together around hundred clinicians, healthcare technology experts, regulators, patient safety advocates, researchers and medical device industry leaders to spearhead the development of a blueprint for proper alarm management in healthcare facilities.

Following the National Coalition meeting Marilyn Neder Flack, Executive Director of the AAMI Foundation and Senior Vice President of AAMI's Patient Safety Initiatives, said: "The ability for HTSI to build and sustain a national coalition focusing on improving patient safety with alarm management is only possible through the vision and generosity of Sotera and our other sponsors who stepped forward to help us with this important effort."  

Coalition meeting presenters included Ben Kanter, Chief Medical Information Officer at Palomar Health, and Marlyn Conti, Patient Safety Initiatives Manager at Intermountain Healthcare. Each presented case studies examining the performance of the ViSi^® Mobile System, a continuous patient monitoring platform currently deployed for use in general medical and surgical areas of a hospital.

The presentations revealed that the ViSi Mobile System averaged approximately 10 alarms per patient per day for all vital signs that the system monitors, namely heart rate, blood pressure, blood oxygen saturation, respiration rate and skin temperature; a much higher specificity than traditional multi-parameter patient monitors. Dr. Trommer, attributed that level of specificity to three unique design elements: 1) the placement of signal digitization in close proximity to the source sensors 2) the use of Sotera's patented technology incorporating accelerometers in the body-worn monitor to resolve motion artifacts 3) the use of high-fidelity data-driven analytics to optimize alarm performance in an evidence based fashion.

"Ultimately, we strive to limit alarms to actionable events that would trigger clinical intervention at the bedside," said Welch. "To that end, the technology incorporated into the ViSi Mobile System aims to minimize 'nuisance'.

Trommer noted that Sotera provides a complimentary initial alarm analysis report to institutions using the ViSi Mobile System as part of their implementation process. This ensures optimized alarm performance and assists the hospital in complying with the NPSG on alarm management.

"Each institution is unique," said Welch. "Enabling hospitals to play 'what-if' scenarios using actual patient data and simulating a variety of alarm threshold and delay configurations will help them achieve optimal alarm performance, minimizing false positive and non-actionable alarms, much quicker than through trial-and-error."

Sotera is also developing a cloud-based data registry that will enable institutions to leverage alarm analytic services for continuously improving alarm performance based on their own high-fidelity patient data plus benchmark themselves against others. 

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About Sotera Wireless

Sotera Wireless, Inc. is a San Diego based medical device company dedicated to the development, marketing and sale of a new generation of comprehensive vital signs monitoring. Sotera's mission is to improve patient safety by empowering clinicians to detect early signs of deterioration in virtually any care setting and enable early intervention and rapid response, all without limiting the patient's freedom of movement. More information on the company or its ViSi Mobile System can be obtained at soterawireless.com or by sending an email to [email protected].

Sotera^® and ViSi Mobile^® are registered trademarks of Sotera Wireless, Inc. 

SOURCE Sotera Wireless, Inc.