As health care continues to advance into the electronic age, technology companies are looking to clinicians for input on ways to better meet their needs.

According to David Freeman, chief marketing officer for monitoring solutions for GE Healthcare, nurses and other health care professionals have been an asset in the planning of future equipment, particularly in the area of patient monitoring.

“We’ve been doing a lot of dialogue with nurses, physicians, administrators and IT to get feedback about the most important trends in health care,” Freeman explained. “We’ve been asking the questions about how monitoring has kept pace with the trends, how it has helped and where it should be going.”

Freeman added that clinicians’ responses have demonstrated an increased need for patient monitoring—a need that is only expected to grow in the future.

“There are several key things we’ve been hearing about. First, patients are sicker, and that trend looks like it’s going to continue,” he said. “The patients that are being discharged from the intensive care unit are sicker than those that were admitted in years past. Hospitals are becoming big ICUs, creating an enormous burden on staff.”

Staffing, he added, is the second major issue.

“Skilled health care workers are becoming scare, particularly around intensive care and critical care patients,” he said.

When GE Healthcare asked its clinical customers how well existing monitoring technology was helping them keep pace with these trends, the answer was not positive.

“The response we got was ‘not so well’,” Freeman said. “If you think about the real-time decisions clinicians need to make, traditional monitoring has done a poor job of integrating the information. The impact of making those poor choices has never been more important to the patient, to stretched caregivers and to financially strapped organizations.”

Enter GE Healthcare’s new CARESCAPE, a technology portfolio the company is hoping will change the face of patient monitoring as health care knows it.

“In a typical ICU, a nurse is responsible for two different pods or bays and is moving between those patients. There are 1,000 pieces of information per patient, per bed, per day, and just because it’s digital, it doesn’t mean it’s at that clinician’s fingertips,” Freeman explained.

“One solution is CARESCAPE’s iPanel, which can sit at a patient’s feet where a nurse can interact with it. All the information is right there,” he continued. “This is one example where we feel that if GE Healthcare is going to respond to the clinicians’ needs, we’re going to take the disparate information and integrate it—not focus on the devices but instead pull all the information together.”

An additional piece of the CARESCAPE portfolio is the newly FDA-approved Patient Data Module, which captures all patient measurements and allows a receiving nurse to know the patient’s complete monitoring history when he or she arrives on that nurse’s unit. GE Healthcare touts the device for its “grab-and-go transport capability.”

Freeman added that clinicians’ input was again critical to the development of the Patient Data Module.

“We have feedback from over 700 clinicians and more than 10,000 hours of testing,” he said.

“One of the things we’re so proud of is that it helps close some gaps. It’s small and lightweight and you have a continuous capture of information, instead of going dark when you’re transferring the patient from one unit to another,” he continued. “We really pay a lot of attention to ergonomics, workflow and how we can use technology to support the clinician.”

Perhaps the first step to supporting clinicians is listening to them, which GE Healthcare does through nurse thought-leader panels, user groups and nurse participation on product development teams.

“We really feel the feedback from clinicians is fundamental,” Freeman concluded. “We don’t believe we can effectively do our job without it.”