Hospitals get ready… set… go… Wireless!

The revolution will not be televised.

It will be handheld.

Because the future is now.

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Medical Devices in Hospitals to Go Wireless

FCC Is Expected to Vote to Open Up Spectrum, Easing Patient Monitoring and Making Product Development Less Risky

Hospitals are getting ready to cut the cord.

In place of knots of wires stuck to patients to monitor their blood pressure, heart rate, oxygen level and body temperature, doctors and the companies that supply them hope to use Band-Aid-like sensors to accomplish the same task wirelessly.

The Federal Communications Commission is expected to vote Thursday to open up spectrum for wireless medical devices, raising the possibility of easier hospital-patient monitoring, fewer tubes in emergency rooms, and more remote monitoring at home.

The shift will make it easier to track patients’ conditions, improving the odds that health problems will be caught before they become an emergency, analysts and clinicians say.

Wireless Hospitals

While wireless technology has boomed for phones and computing, it has been slower to take hold in the medical sphere. Hospitals have provided wireless medical telemetry services that use radio frequencies to transmit patient data. But the lack of dedicated spectrum has made it hard to develop standardized devices and has forced existing wireless monitors to use unlicensed spectrum or Wi-Fi, raising the risk of interference with other devices.

Even with the FCC’s expected spectrum allocation, there are still obstacles to greater adoption of mobile technology in health care. Hospitals are feeling the crunch of reduced reimbursements and rising costs. Outside the hospital, remote monitoring may not be covered by insurance, raising questions about who will pay. “Reimbursement policy is skewed in favor of face-to-face medical treatment,” the Brookings Institution’s Darrell M. West notes.

Wired connections also carry risks, such as infection or being disconnected—intentionally or unintentionally—by patients.

The new technology—called mobile body area networks, or MBAN—won’t send signals very far. Instead, sensors on a patient’s body will send low-power wireless signals to receivers carried by patients or placed near their beds. Those, in turn, will feed data into nursing stations or other monitoring sites.

But carving out the signal band will make it less risky for companies to develop new devices. It will also mean signals are less likely to be dropped in crowded areas like elevator lobbies and waiting rooms.

Health-care companies led by General Electric Co. GE +0.36% and Philips Electronics NV PHG -2.29% have pushed for the spectrum for years. Early last year, they reached an agreement to share airwaves used by the aviation industry to monitor flight tests, helping to clear the way for FCC approval.

According to the FCC, unmonitored patients in hospitals who suffer heart attacks are less likely to survive. Indeed, according to the nonprofit Institute for Healthcare Improvement, an unmonitored patient has a 6% chance of surviving a cardiac arrest, compared with a 48% chance for a monitored patient.

“It really helps to manage the wires and get patients out of bed. That is a big deal,” says Judy Hanover, the research director at IDC Health Insights. “We do see more in-home care and monitoring to help avoid hospitalization. As the population ages, that will become more and more important.”

The shift to wireless monitoring on dedicated spectrum has another benefit for companies like GE. It will “explode the amount of data that we have available” to aggregate and mine to better flag risky developments, says Mike Harsh, chief technology officer of GE’s health-care division.

Security requirements make it too expensive to gather that same data from wireless devices using unlicensed spectrum or Wi-Fi networks. “That drives up the cost of engineering,” says Anthony Jones, chief marketing officer for Philips’s health care division. MBAN “changes this dramatically.”

GE plans to develop a new range of products for hospitals that will monitor vital signs and process the data. Philips is working on a wireless respiratory monitor. Like all devices using the spectrum, the products will need to be licensed by the FCC and approved by the Food and Drug Administration.

Richard Katz, director of cardiology at George Washington University Hospital, says an at-home monitor helped him identify a failing heart just last week. The patient didn’t realize it, but her heart periodically stopped beating for about five seconds, he says. “Now, she is going to need a pacemaker.”

Write to Kate Linebaugh at kate.linebaugh@wsj.com

A version of this article appeared May 24, 2012, on page B8 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Medical Devices in Hospitals to Go Wireless.

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