Medtech Companies Make Interoperability Pledge
Seeking to reduce the annual number of preventable patient deaths, the chief executive officers (CEOs) of nine device makers have pledged to make their devices interoperable, thereby easing access to health data for doctors and hospitals.
The CEOs of Cercacor, Cerner, Dräger, GE Healthcare Systems, Masimo, Smiths Medical, Sonosite, Surgicount, and Zoll made the pledge at the inaugural Patient Safety Science & Technology Summit at the Ritz-Carlton, Laguna Niguel, in California. The event was organized by the Masimo Foundation for Ethics, Innovation & Competition in Healthcare with the goal of developing strategies for lowering the number of deaths, estimated at more than 200,000 each year.
In their pledges, the CEOs say they will work toward sharing patient health information across different devices in an effort to improve care. As Masimo pointed out in an earlier statement, a hospital room can include as many as 15 medical devices that cannot communicate with each other, exposing patients to health risks. The pledge marks a step toward limiting these risks.
"My fellow medtech CEOs have taken patient safety to heart in a way that this industry has never done before," said Joe Kiani, Masimo founder, chairman, and CEO, in a prepared statement. "I am proud to be standing with these eight other pioneers as we break down the walls of data ownership to empower patients and clinicians with device interoperability, information, and technology integration that will save lives and reduce costs. As other medical technology leaders become aware of what we have begun to accomplish, we look forward to announcing more companies committed to the same objective."
Peter J. Pronovost, MD, PhD, senior vice president for patient safety and quality at Johns Hopkins Medicine, also praised the companies for taking the step. "These companies are blazing a trail in the name of patient safety and dignity—a move that will elevate their standing in the medical community as well as the market," he said in a prepared statement.
Attendees of the two-day summit also discussed three challenges stakeholders can address right now to improve patient safety: failure to recognize complications and address them in a timely manner; medical errors resulting from poorly designed processes; and the overuse of red blood cell transfusions, something that can dramatically increase the risk of mortality.
Former President Bill Clinton also spoke at the event and exhorted members of industry to take action. He warned that failure to improve what at one point he called an “encrusted” healthcare system and prevent deaths undermines the nation’s productivity.
“We are overwhelmed by complexity because this solution is tacked on to that solution, and pretty soon everything has a constituency for why things have to stay the way they are,” he noted. “The only way wealthy societies will be successful in the future is by continuously reforming all of our institutions,” he concluded.
Earlier this month, AAMI released a report on medical device interoperability. The report, Medical Device Interoperability: A Safer Path Forward, summarizes the presentations and discussion from a summit AAMI held this past fall with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
A free PDF copy of that report is available here.
Posted: January 16, 2013