Sheba Medical Center, Israel’s largest medical center and a Newsweek top-10 ranked world’s best hospital for the last three years, today 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, including a series of surgeries and catheterizations performed from infancy through the first several years of the child’s life, necessitating the involvement of a coordinated multidisciplinary team.
“The first months of life for children with complex heart malformations are characterized by hemodynamic instability and a significant risk to life with high morbidity,” explained Yoav Bolkier, MD, Senior Paediatric Cardiologist of the Paediatric Heart Institute at the Edmond and Lili Safra Children’s Hospital. “The world’s leading centers have implemented remote care programs to enable at-home monitoring of pediatric patients, which has led to a reduction in mortality from 15 percent to less than 5 percent. We are proud to offer this new program to families in Israel and beyond to improve the care and survival of children born with complex heart conditions.”
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 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 break through physical boundaries and even borders to help those children that need us most.”
The Heart Institute for Children at Safra, together with the Center for Digital Innovation at Sheba, will operate a virtual clinic to support parents of children being treated for complex heart defects from the ultra-Orthodox sector, the Palestinian Authority, the West Bank, Gaza, Iraq, Kurdistan and Cyprus. By utilizing the latest connected technologies developed in ARC by Datos Health, the new program will make it possible to bring Sheba’s doctors to patients’ homes, anytime, anywhere in the world, particularly in countries where such care would otherwise be unavailable.
“This remote monitoring program is another hybrid service ARC has been developing as part of Sheba’s overall strategy to transform healthcare and improve quality, access, and health equity in Israel and around the world,” said Eyal Zimlichman MD, Chief Medical Officer and Chief Innovation Officer at Sheba Medical Center and founder of ARC.
Datos Health, a leader in remote care automation, facilitates the increasing transition of care from the hospital to the home. A robust and flexible, automated remote care platform, the user-friendly yet cost-effective Datos solution enables any hospital department to rapidly and seamlessly build and deploy new remote care processes and workflows.