Early results show positive impacts on safety, quality of care, clinician efficiency and nursing satisfaction IRVINE, Calif., May 28
IRVINE, Calif., May 28 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Dartmouth-Hitchcock
Medical Center and Masimo (Nasdaq: MASI), the inventor of Pulse CO-Oximetry
and Measure-Through-Motion-and-Low-Perfusion pulse oximetry, today announced
that initial results of an ongoing clinical evaluation show Masimo Patient
SafetyNet with Masimo Rainbow SET Pulse CO-Oximetry provides early warning
detection of impending patient deterioration on the general care floor, which
helped keep patients safer. Early findings showed a reduction in distress
codes, rescue activations, and ICU transfers. Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical
Center (DHMC), the first hospital to deploy the Masimo Patient SafetyNet
system, presented its evaluation data and findings to more than 1,500
clinicians at the 4th International Conference on Rapid Response Systems on
May 8, 2008 in Toronto, Canada, and the National Patient Safety Foundation
(NPSF) Annual Congress on May 15, 2008 in Nashville, TN.
George T. Blike, M.D., Medical Director, Patient Safety, DHMC, stated,
"The data that we have gathered by continuously monitoring all patients on a
post-surgical general care floor since beginning this evaluation in late 2007
confirms what we anticipated -- an improvement in prevention and intervention.
The Masimo Patient SafetyNet system makes it possible for our clinicians to
identify patient distress earlier -- preventing codes and rescues -- and
initiate appropriate intervention more rapidly to improve patient outcomes,
recoveries and clinician efficiencies. All of this contributes to a safer
general care floor for our patients."
Findings presented by DHMC showed an 80 percent decrease in distress codes
and rescue activations and a 50 percent decrease in ICU transfers for Masimo
Patient SafetyNet system-monitored patients in a 36-bed post-surgical unit.
In addition, data gathered during the three-month evaluation, covering 2,587
total patient days, showed that the Masimo Patient SafetyNet system supported
the early identification of patients with sedation or analgesia-induced
respiratory depression, cardiac anomalies identified by high and low pulse
rate, poor heart rate control, acute bradycardia needing atropine, new onset
A-fib, unrecognized obstructive patterns of respiration like sleep apnea, and
pulmonary complications such as fat emboli syndrome, pulmonary embolus and
edema.
"The bottom line is that the earlier patient distress is discovered and
intervention is initiated, the better the recovery will be -- enabling
patients to get better faster and go home quicker," said Dr. Blike. "The
decreases in codes, rescue activations and ICU transfers are crucial
indicators that we are catching deteriorations much earlier and that patients
are safer because of it. We expect that our continued evaluation efforts will
yield more financial and statistical data concerning Patient SafetyNet's
impact on length of stays, patient throughput and new diagnosis
identifications."
An influx of more acute patients, the growth and use of patient-controlled
analgesia, an increasing number of patients with obstructive sleep apnea, and
the ongoing clinician shortage are the realities of today's general care
floors. As a result, patients on general care floors are at increased risk of
un-witnessed adverse physiological events, like respiratory distress or
cardiac arrest. If the patient is not monitored reliably using pulse oximetry
technology with high specificity and sensitivity, adverse events on the
general care floors may result in long-term health complications or death.
Only Masimo Rainbow SET Pulse CO-Oximetry technology provides the greatest
sensitivity, at 98 percent, and the greatest specificity, at 97 percent, based
on independent and objective references that have examined oximeter
performance in real clinical environments.
The Masimo Patient SafetyNet system combines the "gold standard"
Measure-Through-Motion-and-Low-Perfusion performance of Masimo Rainbow SET
Pulse CO-Oximetry technology with wireless clinician alerts via pager to
provide a new level of safety to patients on general care floors, where
nurse-to-patient ratios preclude the level of direct surveillance required and
recommended to preempt adverse events. When physiological parameters are
violated, such as arterial blood oxygen saturation or pulse rate, Masimo
Patient SafetyNet provides accurate, actionable alarm notification directly to
a qualified clinician -- enabling immediate notification and early
intervention.
While previous attempts at monitoring patients on the general care floors
have failed because of excessive false alarms, the advanced technology of
Masimo SET pulse oximetry has virtually eliminated false alarms while
delivering the most accurate and reliable arterial blood oxygen saturation and
pulse rate measurements. Clinically-proven in more than 100 independent and
objective studies to have the highest sensitivity and specificity through
conditions of motion and low perfusion -- the most common source of false
alarms with other pulse oximetry technologies -- Masimo SET provides the
foundational technology for Masimo Rainbow SET Pulse CO-Oximetry.
"Our data shows overall alarm rates of 4.1 per patient per day on our
post-surgical general care floor," said Jean Avery, MBA, RN, Clinical
Improvement, DHMC. "On an unmonitored patient, many of these alarm conditions
would have gone unnoticed."
"One major East Coast hospital that tried to monitor patients continuously
on the general care floor before the advent of Masimo SET pulse oximetry
experienced about 36,000 alarms per month for 12 beds, which translated to
about 96 alarms per patient day," said Jim Welch, Vice President of Patient
Safety Initiatives at Masimo. "The high rate of false alarms due to
conventional pulse oximetry's limitations made monitoring on the general floor
impractical, if not impossible. With just 4 alarms per patient per day at
DHMC, Masimo's revolutionary Measure-Through-Motion pulse oximetry finally
enables accurate and reliable monitoring on general care floors."
Also, as part of the evaluation, DHMC surveyed nursing staff in the unit
equipped with Masimo Patient SafetyNet and found that they were overwhelmingly
satisfied with the system. When asked to assess their feelings toward the new
surveillance system, the unit's nursing staff "strongly agreed" that the
ability to provide surveillance has added benefit in providing safe care to
patients. In addition, the nursing staff indicated that they would
"definitely" want a friend or relative needing inpatient care to come to the
unit equipped with a surveillance monitoring system.
"Our nurses are discovering patients in need of attention, much sooner
than before," stated Nancy Karon, BSN, RN, Clinical Coordinator, DHMC.
"Patient SafetyNet has improved patient care with high levels of nurse
satisfaction because they know they are able to deliver the best possible
quality of care to their general care floor patients."
Joe E. Kiani, Chairman and CEO of Masimo, stated, "Quite simply, we
developed Masimo Patient SafetyNet to help clinicians save lives and improve
patient outcomes. The empirical and statistical data being gathered through
Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center's evaluations are providing the necessary
details that demonstrate how Masimo's Measure-Through-Motion pulse oximetry
technology along with the Patient SafetyNet system are impacting critical
patient safety benchmarks, such as the number of sentinel events, codes, rapid
response team activations and ICU transfers. Ranked as one of the top academic
medical centers in the U.S. and named as one of the nation's most wired
medical centers by Hospitals and Health Networks magazine, DHMC was the ideal
pilot installation for Masimo Patient SafetyNet. These findings support the
necessity and value of Masimo Patient SafetyNet on general care floors."
A study published in the Journal of Critical Care Medicine suggests that
there are approximately 820,000 unmonitored beds in non-critical care settings
in the U.S.
About Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center
Nationally-ranked as one of the top academic medical centers,
Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center provides comprehensive inpatient and
outpatient services to patients from throughout New England. With more than
21,500 inpatient admissions, 28,700 emergency department visits, over
1,699,500 outpatient visits and the region's only Level I Trauma Center,
Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center includes: Mary Hitchcock Memorial Hospital,
Dartmouth-Hitchcock Clinic, Dartmouth Medical School, the Veterans Affairs
Medical Center in White River Junction, VT., Norris Cotton Cancer Center (a
National Cancer Institute-designated Comprehensive Cancer Center), Children's
Hospital at Dartmouth (CHaD) and more than 50 outpatient clinics and
practices.
About Masimo
Masimo (NASDAQ: MASI) develops innovative monitoring technologies that
significantly improve patient care -- helping solve "unsolvable" problems. In
1995, the company debuted Measure-Through-Motion-and-Low-Perfusion pulse
oximetry, known as Masimo SET, which virtually eliminated false alarms and
increased pulse oximetry's ability to detect life-threatening events. More
than 100 independent and objective studies demonstrate Masimo SET provides the
most reliable SpO2 and pulse rate measurements even under the most challenging
clinical conditions, including patient motion and low peripheral perfusion.
In 2005, Masimo introduced Masimo Rainbow SET, a breakthrough noninvasive
blood constituent monitoring platform that can measure many blood constituents
that previously required invasive procedures. Masimo Rainbow SET continuously
and noninvasively measures total hemoglobin (SpHbTM), oxygen content (SpOCTM),
carboxyhemoglobin (SpCO(R)), methemoglobin (SpMet(R)), and PVITM, in addition
to oxyhemoglobin (SpO2), pulse rate (PR), and perfusion index (PI), allowing
early detection and treatment of potentially life-threatening conditions.
Founded in 1989, Masimo has the mission of "Improving Patient Outcomes and
Reducing Cost of Care by Taking Noninvasive Monitoring to New Sites and
Applications." Additional information about Masimo and its products may be
found at http://www.masimo.com.
Forward Looking Statements
This press release may include forward-looking statements. These
forward-looking statements are based on current expectations about future
events affecting us and are subject to uncertainties and factors, all of which
are difficult to predict and many of which are beyond our control, including:
risks related to our assumption that the positive results and clinical
outcomes presented by Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center will be repeated at
other hospitals, Masimo Patient SafetyNet will deliver a sufficient level of
clinical improvement over alternative remote monitoring systems to allow for
rapid adoption of the technology on general care floors, as well as other
factors discussed in the "Risk Factors" section of our quarterly report on
Form 10-Q for the quarter ended March 29, 2008, filed with the Securities and
Exchange Commission on May 1, 2008. Although we believe that the expectations
reflected in our forward-looking statements are reasonable, we do not know
whether our expectations will prove correct. You are cautioned not to place
undue reliance on these forward-looking statements, which speak only as of the
date hereof. We do not undertake any obligation to update, amend or clarify
these forward-looking statements or the risk factors contained in our
quarterly report on Form 10-Q for the quarter ended March 29, 2008, whether as
a result of new information, future events or otherwise, except as may be
required under the federal securities laws.
Contact:
Dana Banks
Masimo Corporation
949-297-7348
Masimo, SET, Signal Extraction Technology, Improving Outcomes and Reducing
Cost of Care by Taking Noninvasive Monitoring to New Sites and Applications,
Rainbow, SpHb, SpOC, SpCO, SpMet, PVI, Radical-7, Rad-87, Rad-57, Rad-9,
Rad-8, Rad-5, Pulse CO-Oximetry and Pulse CO-Oximeter are trademarks or
registered trademarks of Masimo Corporation.
SOURCE Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center; Masimo
