Partnership Results in Field-Testing BP Technology

     An innovative project to assist in development of new motion-tolerant blood pressure technology designed specifically for EMS has brought together Welch Allyn, a Skaneateles Falls, NY-based manufacturer of medical products, and Western Area Volunteer Emergency Services (WAVES), a private ambulance service from the same area.

     "WAVES fit the exact profile of somebody we wanted to work with," says Welch Allyn's project manager, Dan Sommers. "They're a transport organization, they do emergency medicine, they use transport monitors and they have a helicopter. And, best of all, they're local."

     The project began in November 2005, when WAVES expressed interest in participating in a program that would require their personnel to drive around in an ambulance with Welch Allyn engineers and test equipment in the back of their vehicle.

     "When you do this type of testing on actual patients, there are a lot of regulations to make sure everyone is safe and following proper guidelines, and WAVES has the right kind of medical backing and the right credentials," Sommers explains. "And they had enough equipment so they could keep two ambulances in service for emergencies and reserve one for us."

     Rather than sitting around waiting for emergency calls, however, WAVES allowed Welch Allyn to schedule eight "patients" per day, one day a week for five weeks, then repeated that schedule one more time.

     "With the kind of equipment testing we were doing, patients didn't have to be having a medical emergency," says Sommers. "We weren't testing the condition of the patients; we were testing what the equipment goes through in an emergency environment. We tested the effect of vibrations of the ambulance or the rotors of the helicopter when we were flying. We tested for how much the ambulance sways when it goes around a curve, or how it affects the equipment when the ambulance crosses railroad tracks.

     "Another advantage of starting in November was that we had snow, ice and clear roads," Sommers adds. "Our protocol required that we run on three different types of roads: highways, bumpy roads and gravel roads, so we drove each patient over each of those types a couple of times."

     For comparison, says Sommers, testing was also done in an office environment on actual patients and the results compared.

     "That way we could say, 'The noise in an ambulance makes this kind of difference, and people in a doctor's office with various ranges of blood pressure make this difference,'" he says. "The engineers then had the skills and simulators to combine the results to see how the equipment operates under both conditions simultaneously."

     Two rounds of testing have been completed and some improvements in the monitoring equipment have already been implemented, based on test results.

     "We learned several valuable things," says Sommers. "One, which is obvious, is that there is a difference between a helicopter and a ground vehicle. Another is that there's a difference between driving styles. WAVES was good about giving us different drivers on different days to give us as much diversity as possible, and the same roads with different drivers gave us even more coverage. Another valuable part was that, rather than having nurses do the testing and report back their findings, our engineers got to ride in the ambulance and see and feel for themselves what it was like."

     Welch Allyn has already conducted a second trial with the latest improvements in place to see how the equipment responds. Once the company's engineers are satisfied with the results, the new design will be incorporated into the next round of monitors.

     "Everything we do leading up to and through the full design of our products is to ensure that we're putting the best quality product into the marketplace and ensuring patient safety and quality data," adds Welch Allyn's Public Relations Manager Jamie Arnold. "That's why we go through the rigorous testing we do."