OBS Medical's Visensia Validated As Effective Patient Safety Solution In Archives Of Internal Medicine

Main Category: Cardiovascular / Cardiology
Also Included In: Medical Devices / Diagnostics
Article Date: 30 Jun 2008 - 5:00 PDT

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OBS Medical's predictive patient safety technology, Visensia®, was the focus of a large study and peer-reviewed paper that was published in the June 23rd issue of Archives of Internal Medicine, published by the American Medical Association. The University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC) conducted this independent evaluation and published "Defining the Incidence of Cardiorespiratory Instability in Patients in Step-down Units Using an Electronic Integrated Monitoring System." Involving 1,000 patients (18,248 hours of continuous monitoring in Phase I), the study became the largest ever continuous monitoring study for cardiorespiratory variables in non-ICU patients.

Formerly known as BioSign, Visensia fuses up to five vital signs - heart rate, respiration rate, body temperature, oxygen saturation and blood pressure - into a numerical index, the Visensia Index. This Index is an indication of a patient's wellness and enables significant improvement in clinical outcome and optimization of hospital resource utilization.

The findings strongly support Visensia's data fusion platform - the only validated technology that fuses multiple vital signs into one predictive and actionable index. This innovative approach is more reliable and timely than manual scoring systems and significantly improves single channel vital sign monitoring and its associated alarms.

The Archives of Internal Medicine paper provided new evidence supporting Visensia's ability to detect clinical instability early and thereby avert a clinical crisis. UPMC has a long-standing, comprehensive and world-class Medical Emergency Team (MET) program. Visensia was able to demonstrate an improvement of MET reliability and results - 4 to 5 fold improvement. Similarly, there was significant reduction in clinical crisis - 3-fold reduction in quantity and 50% reduction in duration. Of the clinical events requiring MET activation, Visensia detected 100% of the events and provided an early warning (average 6.3 hours) of the patients' deteriorating status. Overall, the Index crossed the alert threshold only 4.25 times per day for the 24-bed unit, proving its effective specificity. The improvement phase of this study (Phase III) has not yet been officially published, but has recently been presented at clinical conferences (AACN, ATS, MET Conference).

"We are excited by the positive results from the latest Visensia study," says Frank Cheng, President and CEO of OBS Medical. "These data demonstrate Visensia strong capabilities for significant patient safety improvements, either at the point-of-care, or remotely involving the Rapid Response or Medical Emergency Team."

About OBS Medical

OBS Medical delivers life-saving insight through its innovative clinical solutions for safer hospitals, safer patients and safer drugs. Based on intelligent algorithms such as neural networks, data fusion and waveform recognition, these technologies cover a range of medical applications including automated early crisis warning (Visensia®) and efficient cardiac safety for pharmaceutical research and development (BioQT™). OBS Medical is in Carmel, Indiana and is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Oxford BioSignals Ltd. based in Oxford, UK, which was originally spun out from Oxford University.

OBS Medical