Date: 22/05/2012

Cloud connected wireless body-worn sensor for patient monitoring 24x7

Isansys Lifecare Limited has introduced its Patient Status Engine - the first cloud-based patient digitization and analytic solution for monitoring and predicting the present and future clinical status of patients anytime, anywhere. The introduction of the Patient Status Engine provides the platform for Isansys' "Vitals as a Service" solution, which is now offered for priority beta deployments in hospitals and other healthcare facilities.

The Patient Status Engine is a complete end-to-end system that integrates wireless body-worn sensors with a cloud-based HIPAA/HL7 compliant Electronic Health Record (EHR), to transform real-time and historical continuous vital sign data into clinical status indicators and prediction tools. With the availability of these new cloud-based indicators and tools, healthcare providers can be notified of any change in a patient's health status as it happens or predict changes that may happen in the future. This can address issues of in-hospital patient safety and avoidable deteriorations and significantly reduce hospital admission times. The Patient Status Engine allows healthcare providers to continue 24/7 surveillance of patients even after they have been discharged from hospital. As a networked and cloud-based system, patients and clinicians may be located anywhere. A further benefit is that a quantified record of a patient's physiological status is established that can be used for audit purposes or to determine the effectiveness and quality of care.

Isansys has announced CE certification for its LifeTouch Patient Surveillance System last month, comprising the LifeTouch HRV011 intelligent body-worn wireless sensor and associated Patient Gateway. The Patient Status Engine launch is the extension of the LifeTouch System into the clinical healthcare cloud.

The data from the body worn sensors is transmitted via a patient gateway and LAN or WAN to the cloud-based EHR, which offers a powerful transactional interface to allow multiple and simple configurability and connectivity of incoming and outgoing data. The vital sign data continuously updates the EHR to provide dynamic charting, and is aggregated in the EHR where "apps" run to provide interpreted data and other information to nurses and clinicians (and, eventually, to patients and monitored individuals themselves). A typical "app" is a predictive early warning scores (EWS) algorithm that can be proprietary to the customer or licensed from a third party.
The Patient Status Engine is completely scalable. It can either run in a closed cloud allowing a single hospital, regional healthcare organization or HMO to maintain control over patient data; or it can run in a secure large cloud, for instance as a managed service across a whole country. The aggregated and de-personalised data in the database quickly builds into highly valuable Big Data sets for metadata analytics.

The EHR platform is being provided by Tolven Corp., developers of an open source solution for secure healthcare and life science information. Tolven platform is an open source model. The network architecture, integration with the Tolven platform and the secure server hosting has been achieved in collaboration with Fujitsu. Fujitsu's plans for a managed healthcare data service comprising secure servers, the Tolven platform and end-to-end connectivity provide global scalability and security for the Isansys Patient Status Engine.

Commenting on the announcement, Isansys Lifecare CEO Keith Errey said: "This is a clear demonstration of the power of collaboration, the advantages of the open source approach, and the benefits that can now be realised for patients and healthcare providers around the world. We are very pleased to be working with such great teams at Tolven and Fujitsu. Together, we can really change the game and vastly reduce the costs for healthcare payers by combining the open source Tolven platform, Fujitsu's open, but highly secure, managed service model and our own low cost, technology-agnostic systems and services. With such outstanding supporting platform technologies, we are delighted to offer Isansys' Vitals as a Service solution for beta deployment to visionary healthcare providers worldwide."

Rebecca Weir, Isansys director of business development added: "This is a great moment for us. The complete end-to-end system - our Patient Status Engine - demonstrates our commitment to providing the latest technologies and devices to our customers in ways that invert many of the current business models in healthcare, and allow us to offer the benefits of the Patient Status Engine - significantly improved outcomes for patients and cost reductions for healthcare providers - in a simple, affordable service model. We really believe that this will have a fundamental and permanent impact on the way healthcare is structured and practised in the future."