It’s not every day that an algorithm can save your life. This, however, may become more common after this month's official approval by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for an algorithm used in hospitals to help predict — and hopefully help prevent — sudden patient deaths.

Wave Clinical Platform is the work of ExcelMedical and is a system that monitors patients' vital signs, sending alerts that warn of potentially fatal heart attacks or respiratory failure up to six hours before a patient suffers such an event. This is the first time that an algorithm used this way has been granted FDA approval.

“Healthcare, no matter where you live, is under pressure from all sides – cost and resources,” Mary Baum, chief strategy officer for ExcelMedical stated. “We do not have enough physicians or nurses, and we have an aging population who are sicker and who need more resources and services.”

Wave aims to help ease this load, by stopping preventable deaths from happening. An always-on patient surveillance monitoring system, it displays in real time a clinical view of physiological and medically relevant data, including waveforms and alarms for at-risk patients across hospitals. This information can be viewed by medical staff at clinical workstations and on mobile devices, even when they are not in the room at the time. Whatever happens with a patient’s vitals, Wave automatically calculates their risk, giving early warning of patient deterioration while there’s still time to help turn things around.

What makes the technology smart is the fact that not only does it monitor different biometrics for patients, it also analyzes these in conjunction with one another. For instance, a minor decrease in a patient’s respiratory rate might be enough to trigger an emergency call in regular monitoring software. However, if that decrease in respiration is accompanied by a spike in blood pressure (something else which may not immediately trigger a warning on its own), it could be indicative of a dangerous situation developing.

In clinical trials carried out at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, a group consisting of elderly patients using the Wave system had six fewer unexpected deaths than a group not using the technology.