HIStalk Interviews Nicolas Vanden Abeele, CEO, Ascom

Nicolas Vanden Abeele, MA is CEO of Ascom of Baar, Switzerland.

Tell me about yourself and the company.

I have been the CEO of Ascom for the past two years. Ascom is a Switzerland-based, mid -cap multinational in healthcare technology. All we do is what we call critical communication and collaboration in the healthcare domain, in hospitals and long term care homes and also in enterprise. We are multi-national, in 20-plus countries in the world. The Americas is an important market for us, and definitely Europe and Asia. We span pretty much the three regions around the globe.

We have strong purpose, which is to bring data to lives, with an S. It is all about the lives and the well -being of our patients. By doing so, we want to bring better outcomes. It’s all about, bringing data to life and providing better outcomes. That’s a strong purpose.

It’s about making sure that care delivery is done with the best quality and is as efficient as possible. We improve patient outcomes and patient lives and we enable the caregiver — doctors, nurses, and others in hospitals – to do it as well and as easily as possible.

How will remote patient monitoring develop, both as a technology and as an alternative to in-hospital care?

We enable remote monitoring, which can be in a hospital or care setting or also outside of that, such as monitoring patients at home. We collect patient vitals via medical device integration. We run a number of algorithms within our software platforms to generate outputs, which is data or information that we give to the right caregiver — nurse, doctor, or other  caretaker in a hospital — to take the appropriate actions.

That monitoring can be done in an any hospital setting or care area, such as an emergency department, ICU, operating room, a general ward, or a rehab center. It can also be done at home as an extension of the monitoring in a hospital to a setting outside of that hospital environment to allow a patient to go home earlier. There’s a lot of discussion about earlier discharge, because it’s sometimes better for a patient to be back at home in a more normal setting. It’s also better in terms of recovery, and having these monitoring solutions allows us to also provide the necessary care, even while at home and still under recovery.

We are a key player in what we call critical communication and collaboration. We have mobility solutions, nurse call, and patient assistance solutions. Our software platform aggregates these data and orchestrates a number of actions, outcomes or outputs as information that is sent to the right caregiver, who can take the right action at the right time, even earlier than they would have in a normal situation. It’s all about providing a secure environment to give that right information for the right actions to be taken in time.

Our ambition is to become the the enabling platform to which everything and everyone connects, including sensors, medical devices, and mobility devices. Our ambition and vision is to become that enabling platform in any hospital or care setting.

How have nurse call systems evolved, both from the patient’s point of view as well as the routing of messages?

We have our nurse call and patient system, and then we have our software platform that is the orchestration behind that. Our Ascom Healthcare Platform orchestrates by using the right patient data to trigger the right outcomes. These right outcomes are alarms, alerts, and basic data sent to the right caregiver. If that caregiver is not available because they are treating another patient, the information is sent to other caregivers to make sure that that the appropriate care is given within the appropriate time.

We are speaking about lives of patients. We are speaking about patient safety and patient quality. Our systems are robust and ensure that the caregiver is informed in time of any event or issue. It could be replacing an insulin pump, but it could also be a more serious issue.

These systems operate in a medical environment, so they must apply filtering to extract the right information from all of the noise and information that is circulating. They capture the right data points and trigger the right actions to the right caregiver with an escalation procedure, so that if that caregiver is not available, it’s then immediately sent to the next one available to make sure that within a short timeframe, the right action is taken to serve the patient.

We need to ensure that level of quality, and to avoid being viewed as a system that is interruptive, integrating the technology well into the workflow of the people who receive those messages.  We have quite a number of workflows for medical device integration, alarm management, smart alarm filtering, and clinical monitoring in a hospital setting. It’s also in all of the different care areas — emergency department, operating room, ICU, general ward, rehab center, then also to outpatient rehab centers, dialysis centers, and even the patient at home.

On that latter, there’s a lot of discussion going on about the hospital at home. It is definitely something that is increasing and will increase further going forward. Hospitals are under certain financial pressures. It’s better for the patient. It’s also clinically proven that for certain recovery, it’s better to be in a more relaxed home environment. That’s where the monitoring solution provides the care in monitoring of the patient at home.

How is technology being used to help with care coordination in going beyond simple messaging to exchanging of media and content, where one clinician shares what they are seeing with another clinician who is located elsewhere?

We want to ensure that information is made available to the caregiver at the right time in order for them to able to deliver care more easily and efficiently. We have a shortage of thousands of nurses in the US, and that is expected to increase in the near future. You need to deliver different types of workflow solutions to make sure that you can provide it as efficiently as possible.

Secondly, the aging of the population will put additional demands, and I would say additional strains, on the healthcare sector. Over the next 20 to 30 years, we will need to rethink the way that care is being delivered and to leverage all potential digital tools to make care delivery as efficient and as easy as possible. For example, a nurse today walks an average of 12 or 13 kilometers each day doing their job, going to patient rooms. With the systems and the tools that we provide, we can reduce that to seven or eight kilometers. That is still a lot since they still have to move from one room or one department to another, but it’s a significant reduction in distance walked, time, and the quality of the job that a nurse can provide.

We have deployed, in a number of our customer hospitals in the US, a virtual nurse solution. We complement the nurse who is rounding with assistance from specialist nurses in certain care areas or certain care domains.

These are examples of making care delivery better for the patient, but also easier and better for the caregiver given the nurse shortages and increased demand on the healthcare system. This is of growing importance given the demographics and trend. We’re on a good path to position our footprint in many the hospital networks in the US.

Is that virtual nurse back-up different from health systems that have created 24×7 virtual nurse centers?

We do remote monitoring and clinical surveillance, which can be within a hospital setting or remote when the patient is at home. But the one I was referring to in terms of virtual nurse is a novel concept, something that we see as necessary in many hospital settings in the US to complement the level of expertise. It’s an additional pair of eyes or hand for the nurse to call in specialist advice. We see a good traction and demand in the market for that.

Could that virtual nurse concept extend across care settings, such as a nurse in a skilled nursing facility who has backup from a specialized hospital nurse?

Yes. Long -term care home settings use similar workflows as in a hospital, and we offer those. Obviously it’s sometimes less complex than in a more critical hospital environment. But the virtual nurse concept, the monitoring concept, can be within the care home setting. That allows more privacy and less disturbance of the residents since the nurse doesn’t have to go in every half an hour to have a look.  They can leave the resident in their room or apartment in the care home setting.

We can do a number of things there as well. For example, our SmartSense solution has sensors that can perform movement detection in the room. That could prevent falls if the patient is moving a lot, for example. But we can also look at patterns. If the patient normally has a good night and sleeps seven, eight, or 10 hours and all of a sudden that pattern is disturbed and they wake up four or five times a night, that’s unusual. Even with the best nurses, you might don’t notice. The system can help monitor these things and then preventively say that something seems to be happening here. If the patient normally is up at 7 or 8 a.m. and a couple of days they wake up at 9 or 10 or spend 20 minutes in the bathroom, it triggers an alarm automatically.

We can parameterize certain habits of patients to provide better care. We also do monitoring of patients in long-term care homes, elderly patients. For Alzheimer’s patients, you also need to monitor movement and give them access rights for certain areas of that care home. You can block doors or block access to certain departments so the patient doesn’t get lost and to make sure that you have a secure environment where they can move around. We offer quite a number of very interesting workflows across the different domains of long -term care homes or hospitals.

What are the company’s priorities over the next three or four years?

We are a global company. We want to become that enabling platform in a care setting and hospital, a platform to which everything and everyone connects, and to provide these workflow solutions to deliver better patient outcomes and also better outcomes for the caregivers. We are an innovative company, so we are continuously innovating and enhancing our solutions to provide more value and a better return on investment for our customers.That’s what we do every day, and that’s what we want to continue doing in the future.

We are a company with a strong purpose, bringing data to life and delivering better outcomes. That’s all we do. We are an innovative company with with significant growth ambitions, and we are on a very nice growth track in a very interesting industry.