Technology giant IBM has aligned with a mobility solutions provider and a university to build an acute care system for critically ill patients.
To be built in conjunction with the University of Michigan Center for Integrative Research in Critical Care and San Antonio-based AirStrip, the mobile early warning systems will leverage IBM's streaming analytics technology and draw upon structured and unstructured data from multiple sources, including UM's electronic medical records and body sensors.
This is far from IBM's first endeavor into the clinical data analytics space. In the past few years, Emory University Hospital, Memorial Healthcare System and Columbia University all tapped Big Blue’s streaming data analytics platform to develop similar early warning systems.
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The IBM-AirStrip early warning system will be used to both identify and predict a life-threatening medical complication called hemodynamic decompensation in critically ill patients, which officials anticipate will ultimately help improve patient outcomes and boost critical care delivery. If clinicians are able to predict cases of hemodynamic decompensation earlier, overall intensive care unit admissions may also be reduced.
"By mining multiple data streams, looking at real-time analytics and applying our adaptive learning algorithms, we believe we can come up with new computed vital signs that are even more valuable than the signals we're monitoring today," said Kevin Ward, MD, UM CIRCC's executive director and UM professor of emergency medicine, in a prepared statement. "Ultimately, we believe that clinical decision support solutions coupled with our analytic methodologies could help us improve patient outcomes while reducing overall costs in the healthcare system."
If the organizations see positive results from this platform, the implications for other clinical arenas may be telling, as officials hope to expand the early warning system design to remotely monitoring chronically ill patients both inside and outside of the hospital.
"Predictive analytics has the potential to provide clinicians the ability to see and take action on much more of the potentially available data on their patients, and course-correct sooner when a complication presents," Sean Hogan, vice president of IBM Healthcare, said in the statement.
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