While the mHealth movement may be most often associated with extending care and collecting data outside the hospital, Covidien's latest offering is targeting data collected on devices inside the building or campus.
With the Vital Sync virtual patient monitoring platform (VPMP), the Boulder, Colo.-based company is aiming at a problem endemic to mHealth: How to pull data out of an EMR that a clinician needs at the point of care.
"Most solutions on the market are now tied to EMR integration, but the EMR's needs are different than the physician's needs," said Andrew Malcolmson, Covidien's director of integrated patient intelligence. "We want to make sure that (the clinician's) needs are met."
[See also: Might mHealth apps make the EHR obsolete?]
Vital Sync VPMP is designed to capture data from multiple devices, such as ventilators and capnography monitors, on any web-enabled device, such as a smartphone or tablet. In this manner a doctor making rounds can check on ventilator settings and oxygenation for any number of patients and act quickly on any changes, then push that information into the EMR.
While Malcolmson notes the Vital Sync platform currently captures information only from Covidien devices, "we do have a number of other interfaces that are coming out," he said. In addition, he noted the Covidien bedside product has connectivity with more than 100 devices.
Malcolmson and Scott Kelley, MD, Covidien's chief medical officer for respiratory and monitoring solutions, say Vital Sync targets an issue faced in many hospitals: How to sort and prioritize the information coming from multiple devices around and attached to the patient. The software platform, they said, enables the clinician to decide what information is important.
"This serves a very distinct clinical purpose," Malcolmson added. He also noted that, in time, the platform could be modified to work in other locations, such as a residential facility or even the home.
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