AlertWatch Inc, a University of Michigan Health System startup company, has gained FDA clearance to sell its patient monitoring software to hospitals.
According to the company, the AlertWatch:OR software helps anesthesia providers monitor patients in the operating room. The program aggregates data from physiological monitors, anesthesia records, lab results, and medical history to produce a dynamic real-time display of a patient’s condition.
According to James Bagian, a veteran astronaut and university faculty member in both industrial engineering and anesthesiology, as well as a founding team member for AlertWatch, the problem is pretty straightforward. “The amount of data being produced for each patient is increasing, the complexity of care is increasing, and the number of people involved in that care keeps going up, but the practitioner’s ability to process all of the data remains fairly constant.”
“One of the things that we’ve learned from the aviation industry was that more data is not always better if it is not displayed in an actionable way,” Bagian added.
The company currently has pilot projects operating at the University of Tennessee and University of Vermont. It intends to install the AlertWatch software at several large US hospitals across the country and also hopes to raise venture funding in 2014 to support sales and further research and development.
