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EARLY DETECTION OF SEPSIS COULD SAVE THOUSANDS
An Oxfordshire-based company is extending its CE marked end-to-end wireless patient surveillance system, the Patient Status Engine™ (PSE), to provide warning notifications of sepsis in patients at home within the 72-hour critical period.
This week experts warned thousands of patients are still needlessly dying from sepsis despite calls to improve the care of patients. Around 100,000 people are admitted to hospital with the condition every year in the UK, which kills 37,000 annually.
Now, in a bid to save lives and cut costs in the NHS, Isansys Lifecare Ltd, the provider of complete real-time physiological patient data services and systems, is repurposing and extending the PSE to help a number of hospitals and healthcare service providers monitor 20,000 at-risk chemotherapy patients. Isansys estimates this solution would prevent a large number of deaths and achieve a saving of £70 million annually for the NHS.
Keith Errey, CEO and founder of Isansys, says: “Sepsis is a more common reason for hospital admission than heart attack and has a higher mortality rate. Patients who have undergone chemotherapy face a difficult and anxious few weeks at home immediately following their treatment, many of whom could unknowingly deteriorate with sepsis. By reconfiguring our PSE we expect to enable the detection of sepsis much earlier within the 72-hour critical period, facilitating easier, cheaper and less traumatic intervention.
“The PSE allows the patients’ care teams to have remote 24/7 access to their vital sign data and early warning indicators, and will also provide a communication channel to patients for real-time feedback and support.
“This virtual ‘comfort blanket’ will bring peace of mind and allow patients to more confidently engage in their recovery and rehabilitation programmes.”
Isansys won two national SBRI (Small Business Research Initiative) healthcare contracts in April this year. Granted as part of NHS England’s initiative to enhance the adoption of innovative devices and new technologies, Isansys is now working to repurpose and expand the functionality of its PSE in two themed areas – patient safety and cancer. The project falls under the theme ‘Improving Diagnosis and Treatment Management of Cancer’ which aims to save 5,000 lives by 2014/15.
Just as we are approaching World Sepsis Day on September 13th, Rebecca Weir, co-founder and Development Director of Isansys, says: “We have already made a great deal of progress with this crucial project and are extremely pleased with the outcomes so far.
“This is a fantastic project to be working on and was one which was inspired by requests from UK clinicians and nurses who have identified opportunities to extend the applications of the PSE and realise new methods for aiding discovery and treatment.
“Receiving these awards was a real endorsement from the NHS, and the decision makers within the NHS, of our platform solution. Whilst already in use in a number of clinical environments, the PSE has the capacity to be adapted into a range of applications. We are thrilled to be exploring these with the aid of the NHS and SBRI Healthcare.”
The PSE is a ground-breaking cloud-based patient digitization and analytic solution that continuously measures patient vital sign data delivering this in real time to clinicians for prediction of patient deterioration in different clinical settings. It incorporates several wireless vital sign sensors including the Isansys Lifetouch cardiac monitor – a lightweight, unobtrusive cardiac smart patch which collects data directly from the patient and analyses the ECG to provide heart rate, respiration rate, real-time heart rate variability and ECG visualisation. When its reconfiguration is complete, Isansys’ PSE and Lifetouch will allow healthcare providers to continue 24/7 surveillance of patients, even after they have been discharged from hospital.
NOTES TO EDITORS:
About Isansys Lifecare Ltd
Isansys Lifecare Ltd is a new generation healthcare company that provides patient surveillance and monitoring services built on an innovative, low cost and scalable digital platform.
We are working with a number of hospitals in the NHS and other leading healthcare professionals and institutes to deliver patient monitoring services and patient status solutions using the Patient Status Engine platform and new generation wireless vital signs monitors.
We operate in a wide range of healthcare settings which want to employ new patient monitoring technologies and methods to improve patient outcomes and reduce costs.
For more information about Isansys please log into www.isansys.com
About Patient Safety
The cost to the NHS of patient safety-related issues has been estimated at £2 billion in additional bed days alone that resulted from 850,000 reported in-hospital adverse events. Earlier this year, Secretary of Health Jeremy Hunt, disclosed that the NHS is also paying out another £1 billion a year in patient safety related compensation claims. When all the costs arising from patient safety related issues are taken into account the total amount is around £5 billion, close to 5% of the NHS budget. Clinicians and nurses in NHS hospitals in London and Birmingham are currently using Isansys wireless patient monitoring platform (the Patient Status Engine) to continuously collect and analyse patient vital sign data to provide early warning notifications to help them improve the safety of the patients in their care and avoid the largely unnecessary costs of dealing with patient safety related issues.
About Sepsis
Around a third of the 125,000 chemotherapy patients treated each year in the UK have a high susceptibility to infection and approximately 20,000 will unknowingly deteriorate at home as a result of sepsis, requiring emergency readmission to hospital. Sepsis, often referred to as either blood poisoning or septicaemia, is a serious and life-threatening condition caused by the body overreacting to an infection. A major problem across many clinical areas, sepsis accounts for 100,000 hospital admissions a year in the UK and is the cause of 37,000 deaths.
About the SBRI Healthcare: (www.sbrihealthcare.co.uk)
The Small Business Research Initiative for Healthcare (SBRI Healthcare) is an NHS England initiative, championed by the newly formed Academic Health Science Networks (AHSNs), who aim to promote UK economic growth whilst addressing unmet health needs and enhancing the take up of known best practice.
Part of Innovation Health and Wealth the SBRI Healthcare programme sets industry the challenge in a series of health related competitions which result in fully funded development contracts between the awarded company and the NHS. Unlike many R&D projects which offer grant or match funding, SBRI contracts are 100 per cent funded and the company retains the IP.
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