Podcast: Play in new window
| Download
Cam Pollock, VP of Marketing from Physio-Control joins Innovations in Patient care again to share some of his thoughts on technology innovations and specifically recent advances from our sponsors, Physio-Control. I got the chance to meet with Cam and some of the learning center educators from Physio-Control in their booth to chat about recent innovations in critical care nursing and other trends in medical technology.
Jamie: I know you’ve got some changes in the products and it has to do with changes in the way we monitor and transfer data from these monitors. The LIFEPAK® 15 is updating how they’re going to be making information available to the hospital setting. Tell us a little bit about that.
Cam: Right. Well, we’re here at the Nursing Show having us a chance to talk to critical care nurses, which is always a great thing to do every year. We’re introducing here a new hospital version of the LIFEPAK® 15. So “15” has been out for a couple of years. It’s been in the EMS. It’s been a very successful product. Now we’re really are tailoring it for the hospital market. What we’ve done is we’ve added an external power, so AC power now, which we didn’t have initially on the LIFEPAK® 15 when it first came out. We’ve had that on the LIFEPAK® 12. On the LIFEPAK® 12, its predecessor has been a strong product in the hospital for us for a number of years. Eleven years to be exact. The “15” now, with power, it can sit on a crash cart. It’s a great product for the emergency department with all the monitoring parameters that it has. It is an excellent product for the cath lab. Some hospitals have gone so far as already is putting it out across the entire hospital. It’s a very flexible portable platform. It’s got a lot of great places to fit in the hospital. We also have a temperature monitor. Both hospital and pre-hospital systems now are starting to really get into therapeutic hypothermia. It’s becoming a standard of care.
Jamie: I heard somebody call that “targeted temperature management.” Are we [going to keep hearing] a new term every year for the same thing?
Cam: No. [Someone] has to do with claims that could be made. So really what we’re trying to do is help our customers manage their patient’s temperature. That involves knowing what their temperature is and so putting temperature monitoring in the product is a great thing. I think there are a lot of opportunities to – and it’s not just for therapeutic hypothermia, anytime you want to track the temperatures. Some clinicians think of it as another vital sign important to monitor. We’ve got that capability now on the “15”. We also took the continuous waveforms that we have in the product. Previously you could only – when you went to CODE-STAT, the review software, you could only review the ECG waveforms. Now, you can review on CODE-STAT anything that’s on the screen. If you’re monitoring capnography waveform, SPO2, You can also look at that in CODE-STAT Suite. Speaking of CODE-STAT Suite, that’s the piece that goes along with the LIFEPAK® 15, it’s the event review software. If you look at the 2010 guidelines, there’s a lot of emphasis on post-review, post-event review for improvement of CPR, just overall improvement of resuscitation. CODE-STAT, in conjunction with the “15”, it really gives you that opportunity. After a code has happened in the hospital, resuscitation attempt, you can download the information into CODE-STAT Suite and get a great view using a tool called “CPR Analytics” and see exactly how well the team did with their CPR – so CPR fraction times, et cetera. There’s a dashboard, makes it very simple. We’re excited about those two being used in conjunction. We’re excited about it being really more tailored for the hospital now.
Jamie: CODE-STAT has been used by EMS and that data has been studied in the field by paramedics and supervisors and medical directors there. Certainly, it’s applicable to the hospital setting. I know. I talked to Lyn Delmonte about the importance of reviewing the data that these devices are capturing and finding out that, yes, you’re not getting back on the chest fast enough. It’s one of those things that we can’t just anecdotally say, “Well, yes, sure we got that fast enough.” I need to have the data. Find areas for improvement.
Cam: Right. The other piece is that we have our product called LIFENET which is primarily in the hospital used to bring patient data in from prehospital STEMI patients, to be able to transmit a 12-lead, for example, directly from the field into the cath lab. That speeds things up, makes things more efficient. You can use that tool not only to receive a twelve-lead and just make a decision to act right to the cath lab but it can also be used to help activate the cath lab team. There are some features in there. One is called “one push” which allows you to basically push one button and activate an entire cath lab team very efficiently.
Jamie: Sends all those emails or texts or whatever out to the people that are around the hospital, “Hey, time to come here.”
Cam: Right. It activates a whole team at one time. It makes it more efficient, more streamlined. The LIFENET tool is a web-based data system, data network. It’s designed to connect the devices, the remote devices, with a hospital or a base station for example. But it can also be used in the hospital. We got a new wireless modem that can be used with LIFEPAK® 15. If you didn’t want to go around and collect data from LIFEPAK® 15 in the hospital to load into CODE-STAT, you could actually use LIFENET within the hospital with that modem and transmit that back into CODE-STAT. It makes it a nice little system.
Jamie: Again saving time and resources to give you more time to do the patient care but also to analyze the data to improve it.
Cam: Right. The CODE-STAT system is really about quality improvement, quality assurance. It’s about making sure that the code responses are happening the best way possible. You’re saving as much time, effort, and lives as you can.
Jamie: Because a lot of hospitals are implementing the resuscitation team approach, by helping that team become more choreographed in how they approach things and being able to really analyze themselves effectively with real data, they can improve. That’s what’s it all about.
Cam: Right. We’re excited about the “15.” The “15” really fits into the hospital in certain spots as I mentioned. Some hospitals will put them everywhere. I think the most common way we see it being used is in the emergency department. We see it in the cath lab, EP labs, transport. Sometimes code teams bringing it with them. It goes along with LIFEPAK® 20 and 20E which is a primary crash cart device. We’ll see those all over the hospital; also our AEDs. We’ll see hospitals today using the whole suite of products. So they might go with “20” on the crash carts, “15” in the ED and put AED in the ancillary area. It’s either the 1000 or the CR Plus, in the waiting rooms, in the clinics, across the street, et cetera.
Jamie: And put them in surrounding areas like the offices. There are a lot of places where you don’t have crash carts but they’re – I know lots of major hospitals now have external office buildings where you come back for your follow up visits with your surgeons. You need to have care provided there.
Cam: Those areas should be covered by an AED. There are places where you do see codes happen. If you’re not prepared for it and you got to bring everything from across the street, it’s not going to be the best for patient care. The other product I want to touch on that we’re really highlighting here is LUCAS.
Jamie: I talked to several nurses here and just seeing that we were working here around the Physio-Control booth doing some of our videotaping and they went, “Oh, yes. We just got a LUCAS and we love it. We’re putting it on our teams and carrying it.” The codes in the hospital from where it’s – but it’s such a portable device it makes it possible to do that.
Cam: Right. So LUCAS is our mechanical chest compression device and with all the emphasis in Guidelines 2010 on continuous uninterrupted compressions, LUCAS does exactly that. It delivers two inches of depth. It delivers 100 compressions per minute. Consistently, as long as the batteries hold out. They could put in a new battery it will go forever. What we find – and this is particularly important for the hospital – is LUCAS changes the way codes are run. Anyone who’s ever seen a code in the hospital knows how chaotic it is. There’s usually way too many people in the room, a lot of noise, a lot of chaos happening. LUCAS slows the whole scene down because once you put LUCAS on – and it’s very fast to deploy – you can deploy LUCAS with interrupting CPR and we’ve done tests in less than ten seconds of CPR interruption. Once you get it on, you don’t get any more interruptions. It really does settle things because now you’ve got a new set of hands free. CPR is being done. You look at the vitals and you’re getting a pulse. You’re getting vitals that are approaching normal. You’re getting circulation. You’re circulating blood to the brain. It’s happening without anyone having to touch the patient at that time. It allows people to concentrate on other things during the code. We’ve seen it to be very beneficial both in the EMS and in the hospital environments. We’ve seen some of our best hospitals putting it not only in the emergency department and the cath lab, which are the two most common, but some are starting put it out on floors or putting with the code teams so they can get good – not good – but excellent CPR happening immediately. We just had our most successful past quarter, most successful quarter ever in terms of LUCAS sales. It’s our best LUCAS quarter we’ve had as a company. Things are really starting to go well. As you know, we acquired Jolife the company that makes LUCAS this quarter. It’s now part of Physio-Control.
Jamie: It’s exciting. It’s an interesting device. It’s almost AED-like in its ease of use. I don’t want to say quite as simple as that but certainly just a few steps and very simple to learn. It’s one of the devices we use in our services, on my paramedic side. I take the nurse hat off and the paramedic hat on. It’s great to see that it’s being brought into the hospital setting. It certainly has applications to improve the efforts of resuscitation and thank you for helping to bring that product to us. It’s important.
Cam: This might be something you want to talk to Mark [unintelligible] about sometime. Recently, in Bellingham, we had a case where a patient – they thought he was having a seizure in the prehospital environment – there was actually a LUCAS evaluation going on. The Bellingham Fire Department didn’t actually own a LUCAS device. We loaned it to them. They had a patient on vacation from Idaho. She was actually coding – cardiac arrest. They shocked her several times, could not get her out of VF. Put LUCAS on, they got her to the hospital. She was starting to wake up even though she was in VF. She started to regain consciousness and fighting with the intubation tube. Got her to the cath lab. As they cath her and opened up – she had some blocked arteries – opened her up. Within two days she was ready to go home. She was on LUCAS for about half-an-hour. The cardiologist, interventional cardiologist, said this woman probably would not have survived if LUCAS hadn’t been able to keep her going all the way to the cath lab. We start hearing stories like that more and more all the time.
Jamie: That’s exciting to hear just the anecdotal evidence but I know that you’re collecting data and there’s more and more about mechanical chest compression devices that are out there. It’s just so easy to implement and use and it’s exciting to see that is catching on in the hospital. What else is on the horizon for Physio-Control? Is there anything else? I know you got so many tools out there that are really helping them improve that way we provide care.
Cam: Well, we’ve got a lot of going on the way of product development that I can’t really talk about but we’re…
Jamie: I always have to ask.
Cam: We are focusing on the areas of CPR improvement. We focus on next generation products both for AEDs into the hospital. So there’s a lot of going – we got more going on in product development right now that we’ve had in the history of the company frankly. As I talked to you about before, we made an investment in the cooling company, BeneChill. Currently not available in the US but we’re selling in nine different European countries. It’s an intranasal approach to cooling, focused on cooling the brain first. We’re delivering our first products to customers this month. We’ll see how that goes. We’re excited about it. We think that it’s cutting-edge in the future of cooling. The other piece of news, and we’ve talked about this briefly before, is the upcoming divestiture from Medtronic.
Jamie: Yes. It was announced but really no specific timeline brought in. Also I know, as a customer, there are always concerns when there are major changes in a company that, maybe an organization, a hospital has invested a lot of money in the company’s products, what changes with the way that company’s going to interact with them?
Cam: Right. That’s understandable from a customer’s perspective. I would have the same questions. We don’t know that much about the divestiture yet. We know that Medtronic has announced the intent. Steps are being taken to start that process. I would expect that twelve months from now, if we’re sitting here at the same nursing show and talking about this, we won’t be a part of Medtronic at that time. As a company, we’re excited about it. We see opportunity. I think not being part of such a large company as Medtronic. Medtronic is a $15 billion company, an excellent company, but focused on different areas. They’re focused on cardiologists, not focused on emergency response like we are. I think we’ll be more responsive, we’ll be more nimble, we’ll be more focused. I think from our perspective, it will be great. Physio-Control has been an independent company before, multiple times. We were an independent company at first. We were owned by Eli Lilly. We were divested. We were bought by Medtronic. We’ve been a public company several times in the past. We’ve been owned by a couple of different companies. We’ve been the same market leader all the way through that. We’ve been around 56 years. So we’re not going away. From our customer’s perspective, I think it will only makes things better. We will only be more focused on our customers. There’s no worry about Physio-Control not being around that’s for sure.
Jamie: Well, great. I want to thank you, Cam, as always for just giving us a snapshot into what’s going on with Physio-Control and some great products and ways we can improve our care. It’s another look at some of the great tools that we have available to help improve outcomes, help us improve outcomes for our patients. So thanks a lot.
Cam: Great. Thanks, Jamie.
