The Promise of Wearables for Healthcare
The number of wearable sensors to measure vital signs like heart rate or activity are increasing daily, generating a huge amount of sensitive data. The potential of automatically and continuously gathered health data to tackle challenges of patients, providers and payers is well recognized:
- Increase efficiency for nursing staff and convenience for patients by replacing regular vital sign measurements at the patient’s bed with an automated solution.
- Replace a few data points per day with continuous data for deeper insights and the potential to prevent adverse events based on Early Warning Scores.
- Discharge patients earlier, manage chronic diseases and objectify outcomes due to the ability to seamlessly monitor patients from the hospital to their homes.
- Rethink the healthcare system with decentralized models to increase patient access and engagement.
Collaboration with the University Hospital Basel
The CMIO office at the University Hospital Basel recognized the potential of integrating wearables into clinical processes. However, the end-to-end solutions provided by wearable manufacturers led to concerns regarding data sovereignty and the transparency of data processing. Moreover, care givers require a tool to handle an increasing number of devices from various manufacturers and the hospital IT infrastructure had to be enabled to integrate Bluetooth devices.
To solve these challenges, the CMIO office approached Leitwert to co-develop a solution based on Leitwert’s technology stack. The collaboration resulted in the Device Hub, which can be deployed on premise and provides open interfaces to directly integrate with 3rd party devices, analytics tools and clinical information systems. A productive system is running on premise at the hospital since 2018. It is being used for clinical studies to develop new applications of wearable medical devices for patient care and treatments.
The vision is to provide an end-to-end solution for the use of wearable devices for R&D and patient care all the way from the hospital to patient’s homes.
Watch the Presentation (it's in German)
Source: www.medtech.plus
