Netcare intends to provide Swiss-made medical wearables to every patient in its general wards to continuously monitor their vital signs and improve outcomes, it said, announcing this on Monday when it released its annual results.
This would enable it to be “proactive” as opposed to “reactive” about their conditions, it added.
The company showed an 18% increase in headline earnings, partly due to a R256m “digital dividend” (cost savings ascribed to its digitisation efforts), reports News24.
CEO Richard Friedland said the rollout of the new wearables was crucial to the group’s strategy.
The device, similar to a watch, but which doesn’t tell the time, provides constant data on vital signs, including BP, heart rate, respiratory rate, temperature and sleep hygiene.
Currently, patients in general wards have their vitals checked around four to six times a day for roughly 10 minutes.
That would equate to about 4% of their time. So for 96% of the time, they are unmonitored.
“By giving a patient a wearable device, we can now monitor and be proactive about it, as opposed to reactive,” Friedland said, “allowing us to monitor patients’ conditions in real-time, using AI tools to detect warning signs from the data.
“We can actually see patients deteriorating on a screen. We don’t have to wait for the next recording,” he pointed out.
This would also free up nurses for other jobs and improve patient outcomes.
From early next year, the devices will be used in a pilot project at one of its hospitals, and the goal, eventually, is to cover 6 000 beds across all Netcare hospitals, including general, psychiatric and maternity wards.
The device is manufactured in Geneva by Corsano Health, the founders of Swiss luxury watch company Frédérique Constant. Its CardioWatch device has received Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval in the US and CE Certification in the European Union.
“This is the largest roll-out of (medical) wearable devices globally,” Friedland said.
Profit growth
Netcare reported strong growth in profit for the year, up to R1.81bn from R1.55bn in the same period last year. Group revenue increased by 4.5% to R26.3bn, with operating profit up more than 11% to R3.6bn.
Total occupancy in its hospital and emergency services division, which accounts for R25.7bn of revenue, was up by 0.6 percentage points compared with last year, to 65.5%.
The group returned R855m in value to shareholders through its share buyback programme.
Friedland also announced that the group had acquired a 47% stake in homecare company Curo Health, and that the plan is for homecare patients to also have access to the Corsano devices to monitor their condition.
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