February 1, 2021 – Hillrom (Chicago, IL) announced it has acquired contact-free continuous monitoring technology from EarlySense (Woburn, MA) for terms including a cash consideration of $30 million, potential payments based on the achievement of certain commercial milestones, and a portion of Hillrom’s equity investment in EarlySense.
Hillrom will provide EarlySense a license to the technology, as EarlySense continues to develop next-generation AI-based sensing technologies specifically for the remote patient care market.
According to the company, 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. Contact-free continuous monitoring technology can alert clinicians to potential patient deterioration events much earlier than traditional monitoring methods.
The company says clinical research shows that up to 17% of inpatient admissions experience clinical deterioration, warning signs of which can often be identified through contact-free continuous monitoring technology six to eight hours before deterioration events occur, much earlier than traditional monitoring methods.
Additionally, Hillrom says that early identification of clinical deterioration has led to improved survival, decreased costs, and decreased need for higher acuity settings. Specific improved clinical outcomes demonstrated with this technology include helping reduce mortality related to “code blue” events by 83%, and cardiac arrests by 86%. In addition, clinicians reported overall hospital length-of-stay was reduced by 9%, and ICU days by 45%, underscoring the benefits for all med-surg patients to be continuously monitored with a contact-free solution.