Sheba Medical Center, Israel’s largest medical center and a Newsweek top-10 ranked world’s best hospital for the last three years, announced the inauguration of a new program from The Heart Institute at Safra Children’s Hospital – a first-of-its-kind clinic in Israel for remote monitoring of children with complex heart defects. The program will use remote monitoring technology provided by Datos Health, a member of Sheba Medical Center’s ARC (Accelerate, Redesign, Collaborate) Telemedicine Hub.
Children who suffer from complex heart malformations require significant early intervention, necessitating the involvement of a coordinated multidisciplinary team. However, there is currently a gap in care between patient visits. Young children with complex heart defects have a 15% mortality rate, which can be lowered significantly if clinicians can intervene early. The connected platform, which integrates sensors and other inputs to transmit data of infants’ vital signs to the care team, enables clinicians to intervene at the first signs of a potential risk, with the ability to reduce mortality in pediatric patients to less than 5%.
Remote Monitoring Program Details
The team at Datos and ARC, together with clinicians from The Heart Institute, developed the connected platform, which integrates sensors and other inputs to transmit data of infants’ vital signs to the care team. Clinicians will be able to remotely monitor the weight, oxygen saturation, pulse and blood pressure of infants in the program, enabling early detection of changes or aggravation of the infant’s state in real-time from anywhere in the world.
Parents will receive devices for measuring the required parameters as well as a connected tablet through which they can provide daily reports to the care team. The regular contact between parents and care teams in the periods between the physical visits to the clinic will enable early intervention when necessary and reduce infant mortality rates due to these complex heart defects.
The virtual clinic will support parents of children from the ultra-Orthodox sector, the Palestinian Authority, the West Bank, Gaza, Iraq, Kurdistan and Cyprus, bringing Sheba doctors to patients’ homes, anytime, anywhere in the world, particularly in countries where such care would otherwise be unavailable.
“The connected platform developed by the Datos team, supported by ARC, enables Sheba clinicians to maintain transparency on their young, vulnerable patients between hospital visits, enabling more proactive care, and providing a sense of control to parents at such a crucial time,” said Iris Shtein, Co-Director of the telemedicine Hub at ARC. “Being able to provide this program remotely means that we can truly breakthrough physical boundaries and even borders to help those children that need us most.”
