Michigan Medicine Launches Mobile Monitoring to Enhance Inpatient Care

Michigan Medicine is implementing the Mobile Monitoring Transformation Project, which will allow providers to access cardiac monitoring data through workstations, phones, and tablets.

The newly launched project is supported by the Sickbay Clinical Platform, which aims to lessen manual workload and improve clinical coordination.

“Monitoring patients from your desktop significantly improves the ability to track patients in the ED,” said Steve Kronick, MD, Michigan Medicine's Adult Emergency Services chief in emergency medicine, in a press release. “The additional tools allowing review and capture of dysrhythmias will greatly enhance care and communication about patients in both real-time and longitudinally.” 

The platform allows care teams to access real-time waveform data in locations away from the bedside and dashboards containing trend data to assist with root cause analysis, thereby enabling timeliness of care, leading to fewer delays.

Other benefits of the system include the ability to review patient trends in clinical rounds, greater efficiency when determining early signs of deterioration through vitals data, and general improvements in task execution processes, according to the press release.

“The technology dramatically improves our remote monitoring capabilities in the pediatric cardiothoracic intensive care unit, where patients can deteriorate quickly,” said Daniel Ehrmann, MD, assistant professor of pediatric cardiology at Michigan Medicine, in the news release. “By being able to continuously observe bedside data, we can augment our second-by-second situational awareness of the sickest patients in the unit. We have an excellent relationship with the vendor and are working together diligently to maximize the value of the product for patients, providers, researchers and our larger health system enterprise.”

Currently available in the adult and pediatric intensive care units (ICUs) and emergency departments, the health system plans on expanding the program to more units.

Further, Michigan Medicine plans to extend the service until it has been implemented across all inpatient beds by June 2024. The project team also aims to work alongside Sickbay to make adjustments needed for communication with care teams.

Other provider efforts have demonstrated the growth of remote patient monitoring (RPM).

For example, in January 2022, Cigna entered the RPM world when its virtual care provider MDLIVE launched its first RPM program.

Available to all health plans offering MDLIVE primary care services to their members, the RPM service allows members to track biometrics and report them to their virtual primary care providers.

Also, in February 2022, Temple University Hospital added an RPM sensor to the beds within its ICUs. Monitoring patient position, orientation, activity, and respiration rate, this sensor informs clinicians of pressure injuries and falls. It also detects chest movements to determine respiration rate measures.