Dan Grewe and Jennifer Volkenant from Augustine Surgical introduce the latest, FDA-cleared feature available with the HotDog® Temperature Management System: patient temperature monitoring and automode.

Learn more about Automode >

Automode simplifies the delivery of care and maximizes the temperature management experience to aid both patient and clinician alike.

Patients lose their ability to regulate temperature under general anesthesia, become hypothermic without effective active warming, and are at risk to many adverse outcomes including higher infection rates, more blood loss, and more cardiac events. Therefore, it is important to know what the patient’s core temperature is to inform care decisions. Fortunately, the HotDog Temperature Management System is perfectly suited to helping patients attain and maintain normothermia and thus, reducing of the many complications associated with hypothermia.

The patient’s core temperature data can be used to feed the management outputs and automatically adjust the set temperatures of the blankets and mattress. This Auto Mode function utilizes psychological closed loop principles and integrates a number of safety features.

HotDog Temperature Management Controllers can be used with one of our Esophageal/Rectal probes or Esophageal Stethoscopes and an adapter cable to display the patient’s core temperature on the controller. The patient’s core temperature is conveniently found near the temperature settings for the blankets and mattresses. To begin patient temperature monitoring, Automode can be easily selected on the screen to warm to a targeted core temperature. The temperature data can also still be transmitted to a monitor or electronic medical record using an adapter cable connecting the HotDog controller to that device.

Transcript

Jennifer Volkenant: Hi, I’m Jennifer.

Dan Grewe: Hi, I’m Dan.

Jennifer: And we’re with Augustine Surgical. So, Dan, tell us about the newest feature available on the HotDog management controllers.

Dan: So, Jennifer, the HotDog Temperature Management controller has a lot of great features, but the newest one that was recently unlocked with a 510k clearance from the FDA, is the temperature monitoring and automode features.

Jennifer: That sounds really cool. So why is it so important to monitor a patient’s core temperature?

Dan: Well…under general anesthesia a patient will actually lose his or her ability to actually regulate their core temperature, and as a result they are prone to hypothermia. Hypothermia has a lot of negative consequences such as increased blood loss, higher incidence of infection and cardiac events. And it’s important to monitor a patient’s core temperature as a result, and HotDog temperature management is ideally
suited to helping a patient obtain and maintain a core body temperature at a normothermic level.

Jennifer: If it’s the standard of care to monitor the core temperature vital sign, why would a clinician want to use this temperature monitoring feature compared to what they’re currently using?

Dan: Well, the core temperature data can be used to guide clinical decisions during the case and it can also be used to automatically set the temperatures and regulate the temperatures of the connected devices in what we call automode. This is actually done using physiological closed-loop principles as well as a number of built in safety features.

Jennifer: So when is it most useful to use automode?

Dan: Well because HotDog Temperature Management is so effective at rewarming with its conductive warming blankets and mattresses, it is very efficient at achieving normothermia. So you’re going to want to monitor the temperature and potentially turn down
the set temperature of the devices as the patient achieves and increasingly raises their core temperature. This is particularly true in longer cases. This is in stark contrast to forced-air warming blankets that really struggle to achieve normothermia for the patient during surgery.

Jennifer: So what’s needed to get started?

Dan: Well all you need is a temperature probe, we have esophageal-rectal as well as esophageal stethoscopes, and a proprietary adaptor cable that you can connect right to the back of the control and connects to the probe.

Jennifer: So, can the patient’s core temperature be replicated on the Anesthesia monitor?

Dan: Yeah, actually it’s really handy because even though the patient’s core temperature is displayed here on the screen, it can also be transmitted to the monitor or the electronic medical record using a cable connected to the back of the controller, a port specifically for that purpose.

Jennifer: Can this feature be used by controllers already in customer use, so what about our older WC52 controller?

Dan: Unfortunately, the WC52 does not have this feature, but the WC71 and WC77’s that have been on the market for a number of
years now are able to utilize this feature provided you have the probe and the cable.

Jennifer: Okay, great, thanks Dan.

Dan: Well, you’re very welcome. For more information about this feature please visit our website hotdogwarming.com where we have a longer video explaining how to set it up and a lot of written information.