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.” To top
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