Patient monitoring  

Dräger acute care system integrates patient monitoring, therapy and information management

24 November 2006

Dräger Medical AG & Co. KG launched at Medica a first-of-its-kind system that integrates patient monitoring, therapy functions and information management. With the Infinity Acute Care System, Dräger offers a completely new approach to managing and delivering care across the entire acute care continuum — from emergency care to the OR and on to critical care and neonatal care.

All devices in the Infinity Acute Care System have the same base hardware and software architecture, user interface and nomenclature. It is designed to integrate all the key acute patient care functions based on a common technology concept: patient monitoring, ventilation, anaesthesia, IT, Web applications, and accessories. This integration provides virtually seamless data capture and access to patient data throughout the entire acute patient care process.

Working closely with a variety of experts from leading European, Asian and American hospitals, Dräger Medical researched the key requirements for future clinical workstations in a process-driven hospital environment. The common objective of the clinicians was standardization in order to reduce training time and avoid errors. They also wanted to generate information from the flood of real-time and historical patient data in order to make more competent decisions. That meant reducing unnecessary interfaces and achieving greater data transparency, consistency and integration.

Dr Wolfgang Reim, President and CEO of Dräger Medical, summarizes the daily challenges of hospital life as follows: “Today we have a patient environment that is extremely complex. There are many devices with diverse functions, interfaces, and increasing volumes of real-time and archived data. However, the devices do not speak to each other and display isolated views of data. This can lead to issues such as false-positive alarms in acute care settings. Also, it makes it hard for clinicians to assess the patient’s status quickly. This situation is difficult for the hospital to remedy quickly because both the organization and the technical equipment are frequently not aligned to the patient care process.”

“With our new Infinity System, we have significantly simplified the technical environment around the patient and put the patient back in the centre,” says Dr Wolfgang Reim. “Infinity integrates diverse data sources and generates information from that data that can enable better, faster decisions and therefore increase patient safety. Because the system is designed with plug-and-play components, processes such as in-hospital transport are greatly simplified. When coupled with relevant changes in clinical processes, this system should enable our customers to significantly increase efficiency in many areas. At the end of the day, this benefits the patient. The new Infinity System supports a paradigm shift, leaving behind existing ways of thinking and working.”

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