At Narayana Health’s Cardiac Hospital in Bengaluru, nurses are spending less time visiting patients’ beds and recording their personal health information. That’s because about 700 beds in the hospital are now equipped with connected sensors, which monitor vital signs like blood pressure, respiratory rate, temperature and pulse, and relay that information to dedicated computers and smartphones.
However, patients in the hospital do not get to see working sensors. For them, they are similar to the patches used for an ECG and are placed on their chest. Inside these patches are sensors, which connect to a real-time health monitoring system (RTHMS) designed by the Indian arm of American technology giant Honeywell, and which uses Internet of Things (IoT) systems to relay data through the cloud. use technology. Dashboard, which can be accessed on computers and smartphones. The two companies announced their partnership in May.
Renowned cardiac surgeon Dr. Devi Prasad Shetty, who is also the chairman and executive director of Narayana Health, said that nurses in most hospitals spend around 15 minutes with each patient to examine and record health data. “Nurses hate that job, and at 12 o’clock in the night when the patient wakes up to record some of these important things, they shout at them,” Shetty said.
He said that hospitals should focus on making the work of nurse more interesting and productive. The Honeywell solution also provides information such as the patient’s posture, blood oxygen level and ECG. “It is reliable and provides data on any important data you want,” Shetty said.
To ensure confidentiality, patients are identified only through a bed number, said Nandkumar K, India General Manager, Honeywell Safety and Productivity Solutions. In addition, hospitals have to decide on the limited number of staff who can access such health information.
Narayana Health is one of a growing number of hospitals in India looking to adopt solutions that allow a health center to have more intensive care unit (ICU) beds. According to Shetty, 5-10% of hospital beds are currently dedicated to critical care, but in the near future about half of these will be for critical care.
To be sure, the use of such technology to track a patient’s pulse is still limited, but hospitals are warming to them. In March, Manipal Hospitals announced that it would combine a patient-monitoring solution from Singapore-based ConnectedLife with Google-owned Fitbit’s wearable trackers to track the progress of patients recovering from high-risk surgery.
Nandakumar said the company expects to use its RTHMS product in 30 to 50 hospitals by the end of this year.
“The caregivers walk about 9 km daily during work hours to do repetitive tasks. Hospitals want to reduce this and focus on delivering better healthcare.” He added that many large and small hospitals are conducting trials at the moment.
However such systems are not without questions. Anmol Puri, partner, Deloitte India, said there has been a “significant uptick” in new healthcare technologies and these could become commonplace in the future. However, he also said that standardization of data management, security and privacy, and usage policies of such data would help instill confidence in them.