Masimo announced today that after a decade of developing and testing its comprehensive, scalable, and customizable continuous early warning score, with the aid of leading expert clinicians around the world, it is releasing Halo ION.
Image: Halo ION helps to automate the process by which clinicians assess patient status over time. Photo: Courtesy of Business Wire.
Halo ION allows clinicians to aggregate trend data from as few as three physiological parameters (oxygen saturation, pulse rate, and perfusion index), and as many as are available, including data from EMRs, into a single continuous early warning score.
Each patient’s Halo ION score is displayed on the Masimo Patient SafetyNet Supplemental Remote Monitoring and Clinician Notification System as a number ranging from zero to 100, helping to streamline clinicians’ patient assessment workflow.
What is difficult for people is easy for Halo ION: in calculating scores, Halo ION not only takes advantage of immediately available patient data, but more importantly, keeps track of historical physiological data and data from other records.
Halo ION thus helps to automate the process by which clinicians assess patient status over time, providing a cumulative, trended score for each patient, easily visible on the Patient SafetyNet View Stations or Replica mobile application, configured according to their clinical protocols, that can help facilitate their determination of a patient’s overall status.
Trends in Halo ION scores, which are calculated according to how the hospital has chosen to configure Halo ION, help clinicians evaluate whether patients are improving or deteriorating according to their own criteria. Clinicians may then use this information to, for example, intervene with certain patients, to transfer or discharge certain patients, and to schedule nursing assignment loads accordingly.
Halo ION works by continuously extracting key characteristics from clinician-selected parameters that are continuously monitored on the Root Patient Monitoring and Connectivity Hub and anything connected to Root – such as oxygen saturation (SpO2 using Masimo SET pulse oximetry), noninvasive hemoglobin (SpHb), blood pressure, temperature, and pulse rate – to create an overall score.
Hospitals and clinicians determine which parameters to include in the overall score, how each is configured, how each is weighted, and how combinations of changes across multiple parameters affect scoring – providing the flexibility and customizability to ensure that Halo ION reflects each institution’s assessment policy.
Unlike other Early Warning Score assessment tools, which take spot-check snapshots of patient vital signs, Halo ION provides cumulative, continuous visibility into patient status over time, taking into account not only historical trend data for each parameter but also more complex characteristics, such as a parameter’s degree of stability and variability.
Halo ION creates individualized, patient-specific baseline scores for each parameter – not global, one-size-fits-all thresholds – and tracks how each patient deviates from their baselines, adjusting the overall Halo ION score differently for different patients. For example, the Halo ION score might be different for two patients whose oxygen saturation drops to 89% if one patient normally has 100% SpO2 and the other 94%; those different deltas would be reflected in different amounts of change in their Halo ION scores.
Joe Kiani, Founder and CEO of Masimo, commented, “Precision medicine is no longer only about the right drug for the right patient based on their genetics, but also about individualized assessment of their state of health. Halo ION represents many years of research into how best to take the complex, almost overwhelming stream of high quality physiological data available to clinicians and present it in a way that is intuitive, efficient, and provides individualized insight into a patient’s overall status. With its unique ability to create patient-specific baselines and to take into account many subtle changes over time, Halo ION helps automate and simplify the process of patient assessment, helping clinicians stay focused on providing the best care for their patients.”
Source: Company Press Release.