Arvind Srinivas, Director & Business Unit Head, Stryker
Arvind Srinivas having completed his M.S. in Bio-Engineering from Clemson University and MBA in Finance & Entrepreneurship from Indian School of Business, Arvind is a skillful health-tech professional with close to two decades of experience in the medical equipment space. Prior to joining Stryker in 2022, he has had successful stints with companies such as Philips, S3V Vascular Technologies and Medtronic.
Weight-based drug dosage is very critical in extremely ill patients, especially patients who are immobile and are mostly in the ICU beds. This is because it helps ensure that individuals receive the right amount of a drug relative to their body size. The distribution, metabolism, and elimination of drugs can vary significantly among individuals, and weight is one of the factors that can influence these processes. Therefore, tailoring medication doses to a person's weight minimizes any adverse reactions while optimizing the therapeutic effect.
While weight-based drug dosing is being practiced extensively in the Western world, it is still at nascent stages in India, largely due to cost pressures and lack of reimbursement. However, there is a growing movement towards weight measurement in ICU patients, since research has shown that this can reduce patient’s stay in the ICU while simultaneously enhancing health outcomes.
As a result, we are witnessing a lot of technical advancements within the weight measurement space for ICU patients. While there exist numerous weight measurement techniques today, the most common one is the weighing scales being built into the ICU beds themselves. This has significantly reduced the medical personnel from the hassles of lifting the immobile patients manually and placing them on the weighing devices, which is not only a strenuous task for them but also causes a lot of discomfort to the patients as well. Additionally, with shortages of nursing staff in most hospitals, weight measurements (many times) take the back seat.
In terms of measuring a patient’s weight, the challenges are more in the procedures itself. When a patient gets admitted to the hospital, it is important for the caregivers to normalize the bed weight before the patient lies on it. Most often, the nurses and the support staff tend to forget this, which leads to incorrect weight being taken into record while diagnosing and treating the patient. The second challenge is the accuracy of the weighing devices (which might have a high variance) over time. Healthcare companies can assist here by providing truly robust; long-lasting load cells that work under the extreme demands of Indian hospital requirements. This must be followed up with regular checks around these weight-measuring beds.
Weight measurement is a s simple, yet one of the most important requirements for determining the drug dosage for critically ill patients. Yet, it’s not being followed as widely as it should be. Today, when the caregiver gives a medication to the patient without a clear understanding of their body weight, most often, the patient might not respond optimally to the medication. In this case, the caregiver will iterate the dosage of the medication (i.e.: Increase or decrease the dosage), until the patient responds optimally. However, this is a costly and time-consuming process that can be avoided simply by just measuring the weight of the patient prior to hospital admission and daily during the ICU stay. Today, with the latest advancements in technology, doctors can continuously record the patient’s weight; and compare it with other parameters to make quick decisions in terms of the treatment being provided to them. This will no doubt have a massive impact on critically ill patients for whom time will, in most cases, be a critical factor in their treatment process.
Since the weight of critically ill patients is measured on ICU beds in most cases, medical device manufacturers have a huge role to play in the future advancements of weight measurement techniques. In most of the western countries, every hospital bed comes with standard weight measurement capability so that the weight of the patient is recorded automatically way before any medication is given to them. However, in India, this is still a very niche and developing market segment. I believe medical equipment manufacturers can play a big role in developing this weight measurement practice by collaborating with hospitals/ doctors to create India-based data, while simultaneously innovating on “Smart Beds” to make them more user-friendly, reliable, and at par with the global industry standards.
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