Wearable technology is no longer just about tracking steps. A new class of hospital-grade wearables is showing real promise in improving patient outcomes, streamlining clinical workflows and enhancing the care team experience.
To explore what’s driving this momentum, Becker’s Healthcare spoke with FJ Campbell, MD, chief medical officer of Ardent Health, and John Brewer, senior group manager for Healthcast™, Acute Care & Monitoring Division at Medtronic. Ardent Health, a Tennessee-based system operating 30 hospitals and more than 280 care sites across six states, is rethinking care delivery and wearables are a key part of that strategy.
In the discussion, Dr. Campbell and Mr. Brewer shared how Ardent is implementing wearable devices in both hospital and home settings, what’s working and how these tools are helping clinicians deliver more efficient, patient-centered care.
The catalyst for wearables
Coming out of COVID-19, Ardent’s leaders identified that the requirements, workload and general expectations of nurses were unsustainable. The level of patient acuity was higher and the number and complexity of tasks had grown.
This excessive burden was increasing the burnout of Ardent’s nursing staff and technicians.
The organizations began to explore technology, such as hospital-grade wearables, to improve workflow and the work experience to ultimately improve outcomes.
“This started with a goal of improving the workflow and the experience for the nurse and tech at the bedside,” said Dr. Campbell. “That is how we thought about this.”
A major challenge nurses wrestle with is identifying a deteriorating patient. Vital signs provide important signals that can indicate patient deterioration. “Respiratory rate is one of the most sensitive indicators of whether a patient is deteriorating,” Dr. Campbell said.
Dr. Campbell acknowledged that hospitals have lagged with analyzing vital sign data in ways that support early intervention for deteriorating patients. Manual collection is time-consuming and adds to clinicians’ workload, yet without this information, care teams are operating with a critical blind spot.
At Ardent Health, nurses shared the need for better tools to help them recognize when a patient’s condition was worsening. Clinicians also emphasized the importance of identifying patients who were recovering well and could be safely discharged.
These dual needs, to better detect patient decline and streamline discharges, along with the broader goal of improving workflows and the clinician experience, ultimately led Ardent to explore the use of wearable technology.
The value of hospital-grade wearables
Healthcare leaders are inundated with technology that promises to reduce clinician burden and improve outcomes but many tools fall short, often because they aren’t meaningfully adopted by frontline users.
Ardent Health takes a different approach. Before any new technology is deployed, clinicians are asked a simple question: How will this improve your workflow? If the answer isn’t clear, the solution doesn’t move forward.
With hospital-grade wearables, the value was immediately apparent. Automating vital sign collection frees up clinicians and captures more comprehensive data, up to 1,440 readings per day across various metrics, compared to manual checks four times daily. But the benefit extends far beyond data collection.
Ardent is using the BioButton™*, a medical grade, multi-parameter wearable that analyzes this continuous stream of data to flag early signs of deterioration, often up to six hours before a clinician could detect it.1 Dr. Campbell noted this level of real-time analysis supports clinical decision-making in ways no human alone could manage.
Wearables are here to stay
Within six months of implementing hospital-grade wearables at an Ardent Health facility in Amarillo, Texas, units using the technology saw an 18% reduction in mortality and a nine-hour decrease in average length of stay.
Dr. Campbell noted that while Ardent doesn’t frame length of stay as a financial metric, the impact is still significant. “Length of stay is a clinical outcome,” Dr. Campbell said. “If a patient is ready for discharge, they go home.” By enabling earlier detection of deterioration and supporting timely, safe discharges, wearables are helping save lives and reducing unnecessary hospital days.
Clinicians have taken notice. Nurses told Ardent leaders the technology makes their jobs easier and have been clear: “Don’t take this away.” Many also reported feeling more confident in their ability to monitor patients, knowing that wearables continuously track and analyze vital signs, often catching issues before they would be visible at the bedside.
“The hospital metrics we continue to focus on are mortality, length of stay, patient satisfaction and staff satisfaction,” Dr. Campbell said.
Scaling success
New technologies often risk becoming “just one more thing” for clinicians, Mr. Brewer noted. To make wearables truly valuable, a broader shift in mindset was needed and at Ardent Health, several factors helped drive that change.
First, clinicians had to trust the technology. That meant confirming the BioButton’s ®*† FDA clearance and presenting the underlying science. From there, storytelling played a critical role. Dr. Campbell emphasized the power of real accounts from early adopters, how wearables eased workflows and improved patient care.
Just as important were the results. Early data from Ardent’s pilot site in Amarillo, TX showed improved outcomes, including reductions in mortality and length of stay. These first-hand experiences helped overcome skepticism and build momentum for broader adoption.
Now, the shift is happening systemwide. “I have chief nursing officers asking, ‘When do we get wearables?’” Dr. Campbell said.
The future of wearables
Dr. Campbell sees wearable technology rapidly advancing, with the ability to track more metrics, detect more conditions and make earlier predictions that can improve patient outcomes.
At Ardent Health, the current focus is on hospitalized patients who, with continuous monitoring at home, can be safely discharged earlier. “The clock has been moved up because of wearable technology, where I can now safely monitor your vital signs and see if you are deteriorating at home,” Dr. Campbell said.
To support this care model, Ardent has hospital-based nurses monitor patients remotely after discharge. The system has already resulted in multiple “saves,” with wearables detecting signs of deterioration and prompting timely interventions before patients reached a crisis point.
Ardent’s strategy began with a pragmatic goal: reduce the burden on nurses while improving the frequency and quality of vital sign collection. The team identified HealthCast wearables and intelligent monitoring as a strong fit, launched the solution at one hospital, and saw clear success.
Those early results, including better clinical outcomes, strong clinician feedback and measurable operational improvements, laid the groundwork for expansion.
“I would suggest starting in the hospital because that is the easiest way to produce a clear return on investment,” Dr. Campbell said. “There are so many specific use cases in the hospital.”
Looking ahead, Dr. Campbell envisions wearables detecting or even predicting acute events like heart attacks, strokes, pneumonia or sepsis. He also sees potential in using them to flag readmission risk, identify sedentary behavior, and intervene earlier with patients at risk for chronic disease.
He remains optimistic that Ardent’s results, including earlier identification of deterioration, reduced mortality and length of stay, and improved satisfaction among patients and staff, can be replicated across other organizations.
“The only way of getting ahead of chronic diseases that lead to significant expenditures is to identify patients who would be at higher risk and get them wearing this technology,” Dr. Campbell said.
1 Weller GB et al. Continuous vital sigh monitoring via medical grade wearable device in hospitalized patients. J Clin Med. 2024;
† The BioButton®* multi-parameter wearable device is not intended for critical care monitoring. Patient monitoring products should not be used as the sole basis for diagnosis or therapy and are intended only as an adjunct in patient assessment.
