Arkansas Heart Hospital Upgrades To Masimo Corporation SET® Pulse Oximetry, Resulting In Significant Reduction In False Alarms And Improved Patient Care And Satisfaction

LITTLE ROCK, AR and IRVINE, CA--(Marketwired - October 23, 2014) -

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Masimo (NASDAQ: MASI) today announced that Arkansas Heart Hospital -- a nationally recognized and award-winning hospital dedicated to the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of cardiovascular disease -- has upgraded hospital-wide to Masimo SET® pulse oximetry, leading to a dramatic reduction in false alarms and a significant increase in patient satisfaction.

Arkansas Heart Hospital embraces the patient-safety suggestions of leading health organizations, including the Anesthesia Patient Safety Foundation, the Joint Commission, and the Institute for Safe Medication Practices (ISMP), which recommend continuous oxygenation and ventilation monitoring in patients receiving opioid-based pain medications.(1-3) Opioid analgesics are associated with adverse effects and cause respiratory depression in 0.50%, or 25 of every 5,000 post-surgical patients.(4-8)

Arkansas Heart Hospital officials say that the previous pulse oximetry technology they used (Nellcor) created too many false alarms -- one of the top technology hazards in hospitals today, according to the ECRI Institute. Responding to actionable alarms is critical to prevent patient injury or death, but the frequency of false alarms can increase workload and desensitize clinicians to all alarms, putting patients at risk.

"We began to see a trend with alarms being turned off because of false alarms," said Jason Henry, Director of Respiratory Therapy at Arkansas Heart Hospital. "We implemented a program to increase the percentage of time that alarms were turned on, and after switching to Masimo we were able to achieve 100%."

"Patient movement and patients with poor perfusion had been causing a lot of the false alarms," said Chris Dent, Vice President of Clinical Services at Arkansas Heart Hospital. "Masimo SET technology reduced that dramatically -- its accuracy really helped us with our alarm management."

Patients at Arkansas Heart Hospital noticed the silence, which helped the hospital improve its Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (HCAHPS) scores -- a national, standardized, publicly reported 27-item survey instrument and data collection methodology for measuring patients' perceptions of their hospital experience.

"Quietness at night in the facility has a great impact on patient satisfaction," Henry said. "Patients rate us on the quietness of the environment and alarm management is key to that. We're very dependent on the accuracy of alarms, and Masimo has given our staff confidence that when alarms sound, something is truly happening with the patient."

Masimo SET® Measure-through Motion and Low Perfusion™ pulse oximetry technology has been proven by more than 100 independent and objective studies and used on more than 100 million patients a year in leading hospitals worldwide, including the top 10 on the U.S. News & World Report Best Hospitals Honor Roll (2014-2015). Multiple studies have shown that Masimo SET® significantly reduces false alarms (specificity), and accurately detects true alarms (sensitivity) compared to non-Masimo SET® pulse oximeters.(9,10)

In addition, in a study at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center in a 36-bed orthopedic unit covering 2,841 patients and 9,978 monitored days over 10 months, the implementation of Masimo SET® bedside pulse oximetry and Masimo Patient SafetyNet™ resulted in:

• Over every 1,000 discharges, patients who were not continuously monitored had 3.4 rescue activations, while patients monitored continuously with Masimo SET® had 1.2 rescue activations -- a 65% reduction.
• Over every 1,000 patient days, patients who were not continuously monitored had 5.6 ICU transfers, while patients monitored continuously with Masimo SET® had 2.9 ICU transfers -- a 48% reduction.
• Dartmouth-Hitchcock estimated cost savings of $58,459 savings per patient not transferred to the ICU, for a annualized savings over $1.5 million annually.(11)

"We are truly honored to work in partnership with Arkansas Heart Hospital, which has a proven commitment to patient care and safety," said Jon Coleman, Masimo President of Worldwide Sales, Professional Services and Medical Affairs. "We also are thrilled to see how use of our pulse oximetry technology has helped the hospital achieve its important alarm-management goals, while having the added benefit of increasing its patient-satisfaction scores."

1 Stoelting RK et al. APSF. 2011.
2 Joint Commission Sentinel Event Alert. Issue 49. August 8, 2012.
3 https://www.ismp.org/newsletters/acutecare/articles/20090312.asp
4 Vila H Jr, Smith RA, Augustyniak MJ: The efficacy and safety of pain management before and after implementation of hospital-wide pain management standards: Is patient safety compromised by treatment based solely on numerical pain ratings? Anesthesia and Analgesia, 2005;101:474-80.
5 Office of Applied Studies, Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. Substance abuse treatment admissions involving abuse of pain relievers: 1998 and 2008,http://oas.samhsa.gov/2k10/230/230PainRelvr2k10.cfm (accessed October 28, 2011).
6 McPherson ML: Strategies for the management of opioid-induced adverse effects. Advanced Studies in Pharmacy, 2008;5(2):52-57.
7 Jarzyna D, et al: American Society for Pain Management Nursing guidelines on monitoring for opioid-induced sedation and respiratory depression. Pain Management Nursing, 2011;12(3): 118-145
8 Pasero C, M McCaffery: Pain assessment and pharmacologic management. Chapter 12 - Key Concepts in Analgesic Therapy, and Chapter 19 - Management of opioid-induced adverse effects. St. Louis, Mosby Elseveir, 2011
9 Shah N, Ragaswamy HB, Govindugari K, Estanol L "Performance of Three New-Generation Pulse Oximeters during Motion and Low Perfusion in Volunteers" .J Clin Anesth. 2012 Aug;24(5):385-91.
10 Taenzer, Andreas H.; Pyke, Joshua B.; McGrath, Susan P.; Blike, George T. "Impact of Pulse Oximetry Surveillance on Rescue Events and Intensive Care Unit Transfers: A Before-and-After Concurrence Study." Anesthesiology, February 2010, Vol. 112, Issue 2. Available online here
11 Taenzer A, Blike G, McGrath S, Pyke J, Herrick M, Renaud C, Morgan J. "Postoperative Monitoring - The Dartmouth Experience." Anesthesia Patient Safety Foundation Newsletter Spring-Summer 2012. Available online

About Arkansas Heart Hospital
Arkansas Heart Hospital is a nationally recognized and award-winning hospital dedicated to the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of cardiovascular disease. Arkansas Heart Hospital offers advanced technology teamed with highly trained support staff and Arkansas' leading cardiologists and cardiovascular surgeons. Arkansas Heart Hospital is the only Accredited Chest Pain Center in central Arkansas, and is a cardiac training center for the American Heart Association. For more information, please visit www.arheart.com

About Masimo
Masimo (NASDAQ: MASI) is the global leader in innovative noninvasive monitoring technologies that significantly improve patient care-helping solve "unsolvable" problems. In 1995, the company debuted Measure-Through Motion and Low Perfusion pulse oximetry, known as Masimo SET®, which virtually eliminated false alarms and increased pulse oximetry's ability to detect life-threatening events. More than 100 independent and objective studies have shown that Masimo SET® outperforms other pulse oximetry technologies, even under the most challenging clinical conditions, including patient motion and low peripheral perfusion. In 2005, Masimo introduced rainbow SET® Pulse CO-Oximetry technology, allowing noninvasive and continuous monitoring of blood constituents that previously could only be measured invasively, including total hemoglobin (SpHb®), oxygen content (SpOC™), carboxyhemoglobin (SpCO®), methemoglobin (SpMet®), and Pleth Variability Index (PVI®), in addition to SpO2, pulse rate, and perfusion index (PI). Additional information about Masimo and its products may be found at www.masimo.com.

Forward-Looking Statements
This press release includes forward-looking statements as defined in Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933 and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, in connection with the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These forward-looking statements are based on current expectations about future events affecting us and are subject to risks and uncertainties, all of which are difficult to predict and many of which are beyond our control and could cause our actual results to differ materially and adversely from those expressed in our forward-looking statements as a result of various risk factors, including, but not limited to: risks related to our belief that Masimo SET® provides real-time results for all patients to help clinicians to more rapidly assess, diagnose, and treat every patient; risks related to our assumptions regarding the repeatability of clinical results; as well as other factors discussed in the "Risk Factors" section of our most recent reports filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission ("SEC"), which may be obtained for free at the SEC's website at www.sec.gov. Although we believe that the expectations reflected in our forward-looking statements are reasonable, we do not know whether our expectations will prove correct. All forward-looking statements included in this press release are expressly qualified in their entirety by the foregoing cautionary statements. You are cautioned not to place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements, which speak only as of today's date. We do not undertake any obligation to update, amend or clarify these statements or the "Risk Factors" contained in our most recent reports filed with the SEC, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, except as may be required under the applicable securities laws.

Masimo, SET, Signal Extraction Technology, Improving Patient Outcome and Reducing Cost of Care... by Taking Noninvasive Monitoring to New Sites and Applications, rainbow, SpHb, SpOC, SpCO, SpMet, PVI are trademarks or registered trademarks of Masimo Corporation