James Welch VP of Patient Safety with Masimo Wins Prestigious Award

Masimo Corporation announced  that two of the industry's top patient safety leaders—James Welch, Vice President of Patient Safety Initiatives at Masimo, and George Blike, Medical Director of Patient Safety Training at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center—are the recipients of the AAMI Foundation's Institute for Technology and Healthcare Clinical Application Award.  Honored for their cross-industry collaboration in the implementation of Masimo Patient SafetyNet™ at Dartmouth-Hitchcock, Welch (Masimo) and Blike (Darmouth-Hitchcock) combined their high-tech and human-touch expertise to install the remote monitoring and wireless clinician notification system based on Masimo SET® Measure-Through Motion and Low Perfusion pulse oximetry monitoring that led to a "significant drop" in key clinical outcome measures—including 65% fewer rescue events, 48% fewer ICU transfers, and reduced annualized ICU time by 135 days. (1)

"James Welch (with Masimo) and George Blike (with Dartmouth-Hitchcock) exemplify the term effective collaboration," stated Mary Logan, President of the Association for the Advancement of Medical Instrumentation.  "What is particularly powerful about this duo is that they have modeled for all of us what can be accomplished when you have an effective collaboration between clinical engineering and front-line clinicians, between industry and patient safety experts, and between technology developers and a clinician who knows how to assess in a clinical setting the impact of a technology solution to a vexing safety problem. We can all be grateful for the power of what they have accomplished here."

Designed to improve patient safety through continuous pulse oximetry monitoring, Patient SafetyNet keeps general care floor patients safer by continuously, noninvasively, and remotely monitoring multiple physiological parameters, including arterial oxygen saturation and pulse rate, and automatically alerting clinicians to changes that signal patient distress or deterioration via pager or phone.  The system's alarm escalation process is an important feature that notifies additional clinicians if a life-threatening alarm persists—ensuring that alarms are escalated to other clinicians in the event the assigned primary clinician is busy or unresponsive.  With the system in place, Dartmouth-Hitchcock clinicians receive a pager notification when a patient's condition is worsening—allowing them to intervene before the condition becomes critical and requires more acute levels of care. This is particularly important for post-surgical patients who are at increased risk of serious injury or death resulting from the respiratory depression effects of patient-controlled analgesia (PCA) and opioids used for sedation and pain management.