smartQare: Closing gaps in vital sign monitoring

At Philips, our goal is to bridge the gap between high-acuity, continuous monitoring and post-hospitalization care, empowering clinicians to deliver more personalized and proactive care across the continuum.

To enable new care models that extend clinicians’ line of sight, Philips is partnering with smartQare, a company whose medical-grade wearable biosensor, viQtor, automates vital sign collection in low-acuity units and outside of the hospital. viQtor is a reusable, wearable sensor designed to transform general ward care through automated monitoring of skin temperature, pulse rate, respiration and oxygen saturation, as well as activity and fall detection in between or in place of manual spot checks. It can also be used at home, so patients remain connected to providers as they recover. By remotely monitoring patients from the comfort of their homes, health systems can accelerate early discharge from low-acuity units and reduce the risk of complications that may trigger a readmission.

Now, 24/7 remote monitoring provided by viQtor can capture minute-by-minute vital signs data and send it to Philips monitoring platforms, where it’s stored and visualized as one, continuous record.

The data integrates into Philips Guardian automated Early Warning Scoring (EWS) solution, where advanced algorithms can inform clinicians about the patient’s condition and send notifications when intervention is needed, including to a central station or a nurse’s mobile device.

By integrating monitoring data across high-acuity, lower-acuity and home, clinicians always have access to the most up-to-date and comprehensive health data, no matter where the patient is. This enables patients to move through their care journey without losing data and gives clinicians access to vital insights across care settings – so they can confidently, and quickly, decide what’s next.

With access to detailed and consistent vital sign data, clinicians can create more individualized treatment plans that adapt to a patient’s unique health profile, and that shift care to the most appropriate setting. The expanded data stream also allows providers to monitor more patients at once using the same alert system that can lead to earlier detection of problems before they escalate into emergencies.

Partnering with smartQare aligns with Philips shift toward creating a more connected and integrated patient monitoring ecosystem, enhancing how clinicians deliver patient care by seamlessly incorporating technologies from other companies.

There’s no one-size-fits-all solution, so we aim to offer hospitals a range of connectivity options – Bluetooth, WiFi or cellular – different analytics and parameters, and options for different use cases in the hospital, during care transitions and at home. smartQare represents our first step in bringing this vision to life.

Philips chose to integrate with smartQare in particular based on factors such as viQtor’s medical-grade certification, security, range of vital sign parameters, cellular connectivity, ease of integration into the EMR and a form factor that is well-suited for patient comfort and usability. Another key factor was smartQare’s quality data, which ensures that the data clinicians rely on is both trustworthy and actionable.

Since this integration is so new, care models are rapidly evolving. Philips anticipates that pioneering hospitals will take the lead in shaping groundbreaking care models that could revolutionize patient outcomes – shifting the focus from reactive to proactive care. Below are two exciting new patient pathways made possible by this joint solution.

Background: A hospital has limited space, and an increase in high-acuity cases requires treating some patients who traditionally would be in the intensive care unit (ICU) in a low-acuity general ward instead. Administrators understand that this poses a risk: post-ICU, in-hospital mortality rates are 4–13%.^[1-3] Nurses caring for these patients rely on spot checks to assess their progress – a time-consuming manual process. While the spot checks give the nurse insight into the patients’ vitals at that moment, they don’t give a complete picture of their condition since spot checks only provide a snapshot in time. In this scenario, patients could rapidly deteriorate in between spot checks.

(This is just one example. Other in-hospital uses cases include monitoring all patients in a low-acuity units to detect early signs of a complication and to reduce the amount of time nurses spend manually recording and interpreting vital signs.)

Below is an alternative scenario using viQtor:

Background: A hospital is grappling with growing demand from an aging population and needs to maintain current cost while increasing patient throughput. Administrators are aware that when patients get home, an estimated 20% of them experience complications within 30 days, so they may keep post-surgical patients in the hospital to be monitored longer than needed, which can be inefficient, take up needed bedspace and inconvenient for patients who would be more comfortable recovering at home.

The world of wireless wearable medical devices is advancing at breakneck speed, and we’re just scratching the surface of its potential. Forward-thinking hospitals are at the forefront, eagerly embracing this transformative technology to fuel personalized, proactive care models. The goal is clear: by providing a continuous, unified view of a patient’s health, both during and after hospitalization, we can ease the strain on the healthcare system. Not only does this promise to improve patient outcomes, but it also tackles challenges like staff shortages, capacity management and the shift toward delivering care outside hospital walls.

Early adopters of this integrated monitoring technology are in a unique position to gather valuable data and conduct groundbreaking research, from patient stratification to uncovering the best use cases, optimizing treatment protocols and integrating telehealth services. Philips can play a key role in supporting these efforts, helping hospitals develop tools and workflows to better manage patient populations and empower hospital-to-home discharge programs.

The automation and simplification of patient monitoring, both in-hospital and remotely, are essential for addressing the pressing issues of capacity, reducing length of stay and alleviating staff shortages. The seamless integration of advanced vital sign monitoring technologies and the expansion of remote management capabilities represent an opportunity to elevate patient care and make it accessible to more people, more efficiently than ever before.