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Technology
in Medicine Sept
03
Welch Allyn—Setting the Stage
for
Wireless Patient Monitoring
As minimally invasive procedures become more pervasive—and
healthcare facilities continue in their quest to move
patients out of the hospital more quickly—the need
becomes clear to develop and deploy technology better
equipped for managing and assessing the ambulatory patient.
With such goals in mind, Welch Allyn Inc., one of the
world's leading manufacturers of medical diagnostic instruments
and patient monitoring systems, found there was a great
(yet virtually untapped) opportunity in the wireless medical
ambulatory telemetry monitoring equipment market. As pundits
challenged that such innovative wireless technology could
not be safely and effectively developed and implemented,
Welch Allyn became even more resolved to seeing its vision
through. The company’s hard work and forward-thinking
priorities paid off when it received two patents and the
prestigious 2002 Frost & Sullivan Marketing Engineering
Award for Technology and Innovation for its Micropaq™
ambulatory patient monitor and FlexNet™ wireless
patient monitoring network.
Here Jim Welch, chief technology officer for Welch Allyn,
discusses the value that wireless patient monitoring brings
to patients and healthcare organizations, how the company's
technological innovation is meeting the healthcare industry's
evolving needs, and why, despite claims from competitors,
such wireless technology is actually safer, more reliable
and more cost effective than its traditional tethered
counterparts.
Q: What have been the primary driving factors
behind the need to adopt wireless solutions and technology
in the healthcare sector?
A: Healthcare is a very labor intensive industry,
and it's all about taking care of human beings. Usually,
there is more than one clinical human being—nurse,
physician, technician, therapist, counselor, and administrator,
for example—associated with [the care of] each patient.
Because it is a very highly mobile workforce, the need
to get information to and from those people is what's
driving the requirement for wireless solutions. From a
data management standpoint, getting data from the patient
to analysis centers (whether it is a drug test or blood
test, or scheduling activity, for example)—or taking
physiologic information from the patient and getting it
back to the clinical people who can do something about
it—is critical. Those are the primary drivers behind
the adoption of and need for wireless solutions.
Q:How is Welch Allyn meeting those needs, specifically?
A: Welch Allyn focuses on the non-ICU
setting, which is more challenging because the patients
are much more active in these other areas. They need to
ambulate, so wireless solutions, with a higher order of
technical capability, is imperative. Durability and ruggedness
is also an absolute requirement because anything that
is carried around gets dropped. Welch Allyn has developed
a core competency and expertise in leveraging standards-based
wireless technologies to particular problems in healthcare.
Several years ago, the FCC made obsolete all existing
medical telemetry systems by awarding a new radio spectrum
to telemetry applications. We were aware that that was
likely to occur and started researching various wireless
communications solutions five years prior to the FCC ruling.
We determined that the traditional one-way telemetry technologies
were inadequate and flawed in order to meet the emerging
needs for monitoring patients while they ambulate; by
monitoring, I mean being able to look at every beat of
the heart. We developed an open standards-based solution,
which industry leaders said couldn't be done. So not knowing
any better, we set out to develop a technology that actually
leveraged emerging wireless technologies. Just as physiologic
monitoring migrated from proprietary hard-wired standards
to the Ethernet 20 years ago, we believed that the same
would occur and should occur for wireless devices that
monitor patients. We developed the Micropaq with 802.11
wireless technology, which is the first of its kind. It
has been awarded two U.S. patents and the reliability
of that system is at least 40-fold better than traditional
telemetry capabilities. Frost & Sullivan recognized
and awarded us for that innovation.
Q: What do you believe have been some of the biggest
obstacles standing in the way of the adoption and development
of wireless technology in healthcare?
A: In terms of adoption rate, healthcare
is a conservative technology adopter, and for good reason:
We're talking about mission critical applications and
life-threatening events that can't afford to be missed
when they occur. So any new technology that is presented
to this marketplace is met with skepticism on behalf of
the end user and from competitors who have a lot to lose
if this innovation displaces their current market share.
We have had a fair amount of struggle in first teaching
the marketplace that this technology not only works and
is safe, but also that it works better than anything they
have now. While doing this, there has been an enormous
response on the part of competitors that are trying to
put fear, uncertainty and doubt into the end users by
saying that it is in fact not safe—in spite of the
fact that we have both FCC and FDA clearance on the device.
We spend an enormous amount of effort responding to unsubstantiated
statements that competitors throw in front of our potential
customers. One of the issues that competitors are placing
in front of us with prospective customers is this notion
that open standards wireless solutions that are based
on the ISM frequency area are going to be over-crowded
and that customers should avoid this because there's going
to be too much interference in the future. What I would
say to those arguments is that these are the same arguments
that were made about the Ethernet and the Internet when
it was first deployed. In fact, history will repeat itself
and prove that even though these spectrums are shared,
they are shared based on a set of agreed upon rules both
set by the FCC and the standards-based organization. We
have proven to ourselves, as well as to a number of customers,
that standards-based wireless solutions outperform all
existing proprietary solutions (and we have data to back
that up). Rather than avoid the deployment of these solutions,
it's in the prospective user's best interest, their hospital's
best interest, and certainly their patients' best interest
to embrace and deploy these technologies.
Q: Why did Welch Allyn decide to take on these
challenges and move into this innovative sector?
A: The reason we chose to innovate is because that is
the only strategic option you have to break into an existing
marketplace. When we looked at the choice in radios and
all the pundits at the time who were saying why we shouldn't
use the bi-directional standards-based open architecture
ISM band, we started asking ourselves, "Why not?"
The more we asked ourselves that question, the more we
realized there was an opportunity to innovate in this
space and add enormous value to the clinical customer
by taking the challenge and developing the technology.
The challenges were that the radio we chose was in an
ISM band, which was a shared band, that we were going
to operate in an environment where other radios would
be in the same band, and that we had to not only make
sure that we wouldn't affect those radios, but that those
radios wouldn't affect ours. We also had to do it in an
extremely reliable and predictable way. At the same time,
we had to keep power consumption down so we could get
adequate battery life out of the device—and keep
the size of the device down so when the patient is wearing
it, they aren't burdened by a device that's too heavy
for its application. We are extremely happy with the end
result.
Q: Many believe that deploying wireless technology
is cost-prohibitive. How cost-effective are Welch Allyn's
wireless monitors?
A: From a new purchase to new purchase,
apples to apples basis, in larger systems (defined by
those with more than 30 wireless devices, which is typical
inside the hospital), we're actually less expensive than
traditional wireless applications. The reason for that
is when you start adopting open standards-based radios,
your radios are less expensive, your infrastructure is
less expensive, your maintenance is less expensive, ect.
So on a cost basis, when one looks at the whole system,
as well as the life cycle costs, we can make a strong
case that we're actually less expensive than traditional
telemetry alternatives. It's rare that you get a technology
that can both improve outcomes and lower costs.
Q: How do you see Welch Allyn addressing wireless
needs for the future? What opportunities do you envision
maybe five or ten years down the road?
A: From the customer standpoint, the
faster you get a patient in and out of the hospital, the
better off the patient is, the lower the cost is to the
hospital and the better the outcome is for the patient.
It is known that the longer a patient stays in the hospital,
the more likely that person going to be exposed to nosocomial
infections or simple human errors. What becomes the driving
questions is, "How do you get a patient out of the
hospital quickly?" What we have discovered is really
two things: One, don't move patients around from one hospital
bed to another because you happen to have the equipment
in one area and not another. Wireless solutions allow
you to keep that patient in one bed for their entire length
of stay. Secondly, the faster you get a patient from a
supine to ambulatory position, the faster they'll recover.
Having wireless ambulatory solutions allows hospitals
to ambulate patients quicker. And with the drive for minimally
invasive surgical procedures, it's now possible to ambulate
patients more quickly because they don't have large surgical
incisions that have to be stabilized and healed before
they ambulate. The strategic imperative and direction
from our CEO to all of our divisions is to provide these
digital technology platforms in a wireless way that untethers
the patient, as well as the care provider, and provides
a freedom for both the patient and care provider so they
can go about their lives whether in the hospital or outside
in a way that is unencumbered by wires. I think we're
just seeing the tip of the iceberg. As time marches forward,
you're going to see more and more exciting wireless solutions
from our company, and hopefully, from others as well.
This is really the start of a revolution, not the end
of an era.
For more information about Welch Allyn and the products
and services they offer, please contact: 800.289.2500
or
www.monitoring.welchallyn.com.
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