IRVINE, CALIF -- Masimo (NASDAQ: MASI) announced the findings of a study published in the Journal of Patient Safety in which Dr. George Blike and colleagues at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center in New Hampshire demonstrated that use of Masimo technologies to continuously monitor general floor patients can yield significant cost savings.[1]

In prior studies, the clinical outcome benefits of continuously monitoring patients using Masimo SET® and Patient SafetyNet™ have been shown to include lower mortality, improved resuscitative outcomes, and fewer rapid response team activations and transfers to higher-acuity care units, achieved through earlier detection and intervention to prevent patient deterioration.[2-5] Now, in this new retrospective analysis - involving 3-1/2 years of data and almost 32,000 patients - the Dartmouth-Hitchcock investigative group has demonstrated that continuous patient surveillance monitoring resulted in increased net operating margin (OM), and is thus cost-effective, due to the financial impact of avoiding care escalations while taking into account the cost of implementing such a system.

Each rescue event avoided had a positive OM impact of approximately $5,500 per patient and each transfer event avoided, about $10,700 per patient. For Dartmouth-Hitchcock, they calculated that each 10% reduction in rescues and transfers led to a projected savings of about $350,000 and $409,000 a year, respectively, for 200 general floor beds equipped with Masimo monitoring. The researchers concluded that their findings strongly support that “[s]urveillance monitoring is operationally cost effective, generating significant operating margin impact when associated with reductions in patients requiring rescue and/or transfer.”

Daniel Cantillon, M.D., Chief Medical Officer for Masimo, commented, “This study clearly demonstrates that continuously monitoring all patients costs hospital systems less - not more - while solidly debunking the myth that cost remains a barrier to achieving the superior clinical outcomes associated with surveillance monitoring. We believe these findings may even be generalizable beyond the hospital, to institutions such as freestanding ERs and ambulatory surgery centers, and we encourage them to conduct their own cost-benefit analyses. We’re hopeful that key opinion leaders and professional societies will consider these important data in updating clinical practice guidelines.”

As the researchers note, healthcare organizations often balk at the up-front costs of implementing a continuous patient monitoring surveillance system. Based on their own experience, the Dartmouth-Hitchcock team sought to refute that contention by quantifying the savings associated with improved patient outcomes.

In their previous investigations, published between 2010 and 2021, the researchers analyzed the impact of surveillance monitoring on patient outcomes by implementing a system that included continuous pulse oximetry monitoring with Masimo SET® and Masimo bedside devices, configured to help detect patient deterioration on post-surgical patients in the general care setting, paired with Masimo Patient SafetyNet, a supplemental monitoring platform, that made patients’ data available to clinicians at centralized view stations. Following a successful implementation in a smaller unit, where they found a 65% reduction in rapid response team activations and a 48% reduction in transfers back to the ICU,[2] the Masimo continuous monitoring system was expanded to cover more than 200 inpatient beds in all medical and surgical units. After ten years of operation, they reported that the system was associated with a 50% reduction in unplanned transfers and 60% reduction in rescue events[3] while achieving zero preventable deaths or brain damage due to opioid-induced respiratory depression.[4] The benefits of Masimo SET® with Patient SafetyNet were subsequently and independently confirmed in a 2022 study published by a large, 1,200-bed hospital system in Saudi Arabia, which additionally found a reduction in all-cause mortality and improved resuscitative outcomes when comparing the time periods pre- and post-deployment of Masimo’s continuous patient monitoring surveillance system.[5]

The current Dartmouth-Hitchcock cost-savings study builds upon an earlier published cost-benefit analysis estimating that use of their Masimo system was saving Dartmouth-Hitchcock $1.48 million each year.6 This newly published study applies more rigorous and granular methods in calculating financial savings associated with the improved outcomes made possible by continuous general floor monitoring. To do so, the research team examined retrospective patient data for 31,993 general floor patients, admitted over a 3-1/2 year interval from July 2016 to December 2019, and methodically calculated the operating margins for patients with “uncomplicated” and various degrees of “complicated” care experiences.

All of the enrolled patients received standardized continuous SpO2 monitoring using Masimo SET® pulse oximetry on tetherless Radius PPG® sensors, with automated data transfer to Patient SafetyNet; vital signs were spot-checked every four hours. The patients were segmented into groups depending on whether they a) survived to hospital discharge without rescue or transfer (“uncomplicated” patient scenarios); b) needed rescue but not transfer to a higher level of care (HLOC); c) needed rescue and transfer to HLOC; and d) died in the hospital (increasingly severe complications). Of the enrolled patients, 92.7% had uncomplicated stays, and 7.5% suffered various degrees of complication. The researchers tracked each patient’s associated cost, revenue, and operating margin to calculate an average operating margin for each group, which served as the primary outcome for further analysis.

The researchers found that the uncomplicated group was associated with an average operating gain of $2,016 per patient (as well as a median length of stay, or LOS, of 3.2 days) and an overall gain of $17M per year. Conversely, patients who needed rescue (but not transfer) were associated with an average operating loss of $3,516 per patient (and a median LOS of 6.7 days), a net loss of about $2.3M per year. Avoiding a rescue (i.e. a patient’s stay becoming classed as uncomplicated) had a net favorable OM impact of $5,532. Patients who went on to need transfer to HLOC were associated with an average loss of $8,746 per patient (and a median LOS of 9.8 days), a net loss of $3.4M per year. Avoiding a transfer after a rescue had a net favorable OM impact of $5,230 and avoiding a transfer and rescue altogether (i.e. becoming uncomplicated) had a net favorable OM impact of about $10,762.

Extrapolating from these findings, the researchers calculated that through the use of the Masimo supplemental monitoring system, the OM impact of reducing rescues and transfers by 10% - a conservative figure based on their previously reported experiences - translates into approximate net positive total margin impact of $350,000 and $409,000 per year, respectively, for a hospital with 200 Masimo-monitored beds. Though the exact amount will of course vary by institution, their methodology, as they noted, is “generalizable and easy to replicate” - a potential roadmap for other institutions to follow when evaluating the impact of implementing continuous patient monitoring.