Hillrom Buys EarlySense’s Contact-Free Continuous Monitoring Tech

Hillrom acquired EarlySense’s contact-free continuous monitoring technology for $30 million, potential payments based on achievement of certain commercial milestones, and a part of Hillrom’s equity investment in EarlySense.
 
“Hillrom is transforming care with highly differentiated sensing and digital communication capabilities that drive improved patient safety and ensure timely, effective clinical intervention,” Hillrom president and CEO John Groetelaars said in a press release. “We look forward to bringing these critical technologies to more customers around the world as we deliver on our vision of Advancing Connected Care.”
 
Hillrom will provide EarlySense a license to the technology, as EarlySense continues to develop next-gen AI-based remote sensing technologies.
 
“EarlySense technology has monitored over one million patients and helped care teams save tens of thousands of lives. Transferring this technology to Hillrom will advance our global impact in acute care settings,” said Matt Johnson, CEO of EarlySense. “Simultaneously, we are excited to focus our future on post-acute remote patient care, which is growing dramatically and has experienced widespread acceptance and momentum in the market due to the COVID-19 pandemic.”
 
Hillrom defined a new standard of care with the integration of EarlySense’s contact-free continuous monitoring and analytics technology into the Centrella Smart+ med-surg bed and ecosystem of connected devices.
 
The Centrella Smart+ bed offers optimized patient safety, enhanced patient satisfaction, and advanced caregiver-focused technology, and allows for continuous monitoring of patients’ heart and respiratory rates over 100 times per minute without ever touching the patient. Respiratory rate and heart rate-based models are the most accurate vital signs models for detection of critical illness in general medical-surgical units.¹ Contact-free continuous monitoring technology can alert clinicians to potential patient deterioration events much earlier than traditional monitoring methods.
 
Clinical research has demonstrated that up to 17 percent of inpatient admissions experience clinical deterioration², warning signs of which can often be identified through contact-free continuous monitoring technology six to eight hours before deterioration events occur³, much earlier than traditional monitoring methods.
 
Early identification of clinical deterioration has led to improved survival, decreased costs, and decreased need for higher acuity settings.⁴ Specific improved clinical outcomes demonstrated with this technology include helping reduce mortality related to “code blue” events by 83 percent, and cardiac arrests by 86 percent.² In addition, clinicians reported overall hospital length-of-stay was reduced by 9 percent, and ICU days by 45 percent², underscoring the benefits for all med-surg patients to be continuously monitored with a contact-free solution.
 
References
¹ Churpek MM, Adhikari R, Edelson DP. The value of vital sign trends for detecting clinical deterioration on the wards. Resuscitation. 2016;102:1-5.
² Ben-ari J, Zimlichman E, Adi N, Sorkine P. Contactless respiratory and heart rate monitoring: validation of an innovative tool. J Med Eng Technol. 2010;34(7-8):393-8.
³ Brown H, Terrence J, Vasquez P, Bates DW, Zimlichman E. Continuous monitoring in an inpatient medical-surgical unit: a controlled clinical trial. Am J Med. 2014;127(3):226-32.
⁴ Vincent JL, Einav S, Pearse R, et al. Improving detection of patient deterioration in the general hospital ward environment. Eur J Anaesthesiol. 2018;35(5):325-333.