A number of institutions, including the Mayo Clinic, Philips Research North America and the United States Critical Illness and Injury Trials Group will come together to reduce complications in intensive care units.
Around 27 percent of Medicare beneficiaries have some sort of medical error during their treatment, mainly due to information overload on the part of healthcare professionals.
The institutions have been awarded $16 million from the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation (CMMI) to improve critical care by building a cloud-based medical decision support system.
We're grateful that CMMI has recognized the commitment of our physicians, scientists and collaborators to drive patient-centered, high-value care,” said Dr. John Noseworthy, president and CEO at Mayo Clinic. “We remain constant in our unfailing focus on meeting the needs of patients.”
Other hospitals and research centers participating in the study include Duke University, University of Minnesota, Tufts Medical Center, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Albert Einstein Medical School, Montefiore Medical Center and Lawrence General Hospital, as well as other hospitals in Minnesota, Massachusetts, New York and Oklahoma.
Preventable medical errors not only jeopardize patient outcomes; they add to the cost of treatment, which in the case of Medicare and Medicaid, must be passed onto taxpayers.
The new application will build on Mayo Clinic’s earlier Ambient Warning and Response Evaluation. It will create a secure, encrypted bi-directional communications link between a healthcare worker and a cloud-based application, where data is sent to be interpreted.
Doctors and other professionals will be able to get alerts if a potential problem is detected.
The system will use Philips Intellibridge as a base to store the information coming from patients, and Philips Intellivue to build and monitor a rich data set, which hospitals will be able to use to track performance.
Over 1,440 caregivers will be trained on the system over the next several years. Its creators hope that it will eventually be deployed in ICUs around the world.
“Meaningful improvements to ICU patient care are emerging from this collaboration,” said Mike Mancuso, CEO of Patient Care and Clinical Informatics for Philips Healthcare. “This technology is helping to enhance medical decision making and reduce medical errors in a sustainable way, ultimately addressing the reality of how care is delivered in an evolving health care environment.”
Children's University Hospital in Dublin also recently upgraded its information systems in its ICU with InterSystems software.
Edited by
Braden Becker
