Therapeutic Monitoring Systems Inc.

 

Patients with critical illness have the greatest risk of death and incur the greatest costs of all hospitalized patients. Patient health monitoring in intensive care units (ICU) is a critical, often life and death, challenge. Despite the best efforts of modern medical care and technology, the reality is that once critical illness is established (e.g. severe infection leading to shock and organ failure), the risk of death remains unacceptably high. A 2004 study at Johns Hopkins University Hospital documented that almost 170,000 unnecessary ICU deaths occur annually in the US.

Current patient vital sign monitoring technology and laboratory measurement is inadequate to diagnose critical illness such as major infection early, or to prognosticate its severity. Frequently, detection of infection is only made once it is well established, and, even once detected and treated, current clinical practice cannot predict who will deteriorate and who will not.

At present, vital sign monitoring equipment measures and charts patient vital signs based upon change in absolute values and determines alerts based on acceptable ranges in a standard population. This paradigm of monitoring is concerned with absolute values determined at points-in-time, and ignores data between those assessments. However, measuring absolute values is descriptive and reactive, rather than diagnostic, predictive and integrative. In addition, information relative to a standard population may be of little relevance to any given individual patient. As a result, with current practices, our ability to determine who is sick, who is not, who is getting better and who is getting worse, is imprecise and fraught with uncertainty, and at best guided by population-determined probabilities. Patients are often diagnosed late, after they have already become critically ill. Furthermore, when patients are thought to be getting better, because we cannot reliably determine that this is indeed the case, they are frequently monitored in expensive critical care environments longer than is necessary.

In too many instances, the inability of health care practitioners to provide early diagnosis and effective real-time prognosis of critical illness impairs both the quality and efficiency of care. A need exists to integrate the wealth of monitored physiological data, providing critical care providers with a tool to make better, more rapid and more accurate decisions when diagnosing and treating their patients.