GE Healthcare announces FDA clearance of CARESCAPE Monitor B850

Oct 6 2009

GE Healthcare today announced the FDA-cleared CARESCAPE™ Monitor B850, which provides caregivers with a unique level of integration between patient monitoring data and hospital information systems. Unlike traditional patient monitors, CARESCAPE Monitor B850 directly links hospital networks, electronic medical records (EMRs), diagnostic images, lab results and third-party devices with real-time patient monitoring data, to support efficient clinical decision-making. This enables CARESCAPE Monitor B850 to integrate its continuous clinical measurements with other elements of the patient record, delivering it at the point of care.

The CARESCAPE Monitor B850 brings together the strong clinical heritage of Datex-Ohmeda’s anesthesia and Marquette Electronics’ cardiac expertise. It provides customized clinical information displays by care area and clinician preference, while also enabling hospitals to standardize on a monitoring platform throughout the organization. Developed with thousands of hours of field and in-house testing, the CARESCAPE Monitor B850 is the latest product in the GE Healthcare CARESCAPE portfolio, designed to deliver streamlined access to critical patient information for enhanced decision making.

“The CARESCAPE Monitor B850 reflects GE's commitment to a new approach to patient monitoring—one that transforms streams of once uncoordinated patient data into meaningful, easily accessible clinical intelligence,” said David Ataide, vice president and general manager of Monitoring Solutions and Diagnostic Cardiology, GE Healthcare. “Empowering doctors and nurses with quality patient information supports fast, easy clinical decision-making, which may lead to improved patient outcomes, the foundation of GE’s Clinical Information Logistics vision. Because each hospital care area treats a unique group of patients with distinct clinical needs, the CARESCAPE Monitor B850 now enables standardization on a single monitoring platform that can be customized to meet specific care area demands.”

The CARESCAPE Monitor B850 is part of an easy to use system that can be customized to meet a variety of clinical needs. For example:

• ECG—Traditionally, when a patient experiences chest pain, a caregiver must find and move an ECG machine from a different location to the patient’s bedside. The CARESCAPE Monitor B850 not only enables ‘cart-less’ diagnostic ECGs at the bedside, but also exchanges data with the MUSE ECG repository, facilitating ECG analysis and comparisons to the patient’s prior ECG, supporting more informed clinical decisions.
• Administering Anesthetics—Anesthesia clinicians have historically administered anesthetics without real-time, integrated anesthetic management tools because anesthesia delivery and patient monitoring systems are often ineffectively integrated. GE Navigator Applications Suite combined with CARESCAPE Monitor B850 analyzes drug therapy information to model and predict the effect of anesthesia-related drugs and drug interactions. This enables clinicians to visualize modeled anesthetic drug effect predictions against live patient data, which supports patient tailored anesthesia.
• Diagnostic Images, Lab Information & more—The CARESCAPE Monitor B850 enables bedside viewing of hospital EMRs, as well as x-rays, labs and other diagnostic reports, including the associated diagnoses from the hospital’s experts. This quick, comprehensive view of the patient’s records encourages confidence as clinicians make critical decisions at the point of care.

Built upon the latest Intel® embedded processing technology, the CARESCAPE Monitor B850 performs quickly and reliably.

Protecting Existing Hospital Investments

To preserve patient monitoring investments already made by thousands of GE Healthcare customers worldwide, the CARESCAPE Monitor B850 is compatible with existing Marquette and Datex-Ohmeda products. GE’s component innovation strategy provides for an unprecedented level of backwards compatibility, allowing hospitals to leverage prior technology investments while updating monitors in the areas of strongest clinical need.