For GE Healthcare (Waukesha, Wisconsin) patient monitoring is a $1 billion business, so it's no wonder the company goes to great lengths to find out what its customers are thinking about current products and what they say they need in the future.

Traditionally, healthcare providers have used patient monitoring as a "safety net," according to David Freeman, chief marketing officer for patient monitoring at GE Healthcare. But that will change dramatically, he told Medical Device Daily, as companies are required to leverage their capabilities in a variety of areas to stay ahead of the curve. That vision involves a variety of components: wireless networks, touchscreens, cell phones and other wireless devices — from IT to imaging.

GE has been talking to users of such systems, from nurses to physicians, Freeman said, and is now two years into a continuing process of questioning.

The result: a new portfolio of products, the first of which gained FDA clearance earlier this year, under the company's new Carescape brand.

In May, GE Healthcare reported clearance for its Carescape patient data module for mobile patient monitoring. The module features 24-hour capture of patient data and a close-to-the-patient self-powered design expected to alleviate common portability constraints.

For example, when nurses change shifts or when a patient is moved with other monitors, there is the potential for losing data. And, as Freeman pointed out, about one-third of all patients in acute care settings are transferred from one facility to another at least once.

Already, GE Healthcare is "beginning to think about the five-year horizon" for its Carescape portfolio. As for whether this new patient monitoring vision comes with a higher cost, Freeman said GE takes its customers' "investment protection very seriously."

The Carescape portfolio is therefore based on platform technology that is "backwards- and future-compatible," he said, meaning it is compatible with products hospitals may already have, as well as those GE Healthcare may introduce in the future.

In addition to Carescape Patient Data Module, the Carescape portfolio includes:

• Carescape CIC Pro, which assimilates real-time and historical patient data from multiple monitoring sources for caregivers. The product is designed to integrate data to view a single patient, or up to 16 patients per display. Clinicians can view near real-time parameters, manage patient information and view a one-hour trending of parameters to make treatment decisions, according to the company.

Carescape CIC Pro also enables access to any patient on the hospital network and to hospital-wide applications such as radiology or lab results to help improve productivity.

• Carescape iPanel , designed to aggregate data from multiple systems and devices into a Web-based portal that provides efficient access to care-critical information. Using a tablet PC or other workstation, clinicians can view lab results, cardiology information, diagnostic images, history and physical documentation and other details. Carescape iPanel automatically identifies the correct patient's data from across the enterprise, without requiring separate logins to various applications, helping clinicians save time and improve accuracy.

• Carescape Enterprise Access , a single, integrated wireless platform enables critical patient data to be coordinated, managed and distributed without the type of communications failures, interference or interruptions caused by un-integrated systems. Carescape Enterprise Access "transparently incorporates new systems and services without the need to install parallel, standalone IT infrastructures," the company says.

• Carescape Mobile Viewers , designed to offer clinicians remote access to up-to-the-moment waveforms, numerics, visual alarms and trends for one or multiple patients. Clinicians can closely monitor a patient's condition from almost anywhere within or outside the hospital using Web-enabled PCs, wireless laptops, tablet PCs and or cell phones, the company said.

"Really [it's been] a continuum of nurses, IT professionals and physicians," Freeman said, in pointing to the sources of vision in developing these products — both its own customers and its competitors.

Freeman said that the company has asked two primary questions: Has monitoring technology kept pace with needs? And what is their prediction of future trends in monitoring.

The answer to the first "has been resoundingly 'no,'" i.e., that patient monitoring has not kept pace with needs, Freeman said. Monitoring systems are too often "hard to use" and are "not integrated with workflow."

As to future trends, Freeman says that the company's products are being formatted to respond to the issues facing U.S. healthcare, as outlined by a variety of rather daunting projections: that the number of patients with critical conditions in hospitals grew by 21% in a five-year period; that by 2020, there could be a shortage of 1 million registered nurses in the U.S.; and that U.S. demand for patient monitoring systems will grow by 5.4% annually through 2010, due in large part to technological advances.

The big overall trend: sicker patients with fewer people to care for them in the acute care setting.

GE is working to "make sure our vision is aligned with our customers," Freeman said, with an eye toward helping healthcare providers make "faster, easier decisions" for patient care.

GE Healthcare is a $17 billion unit of General Electric (Fairfield, Connecticut).