by
Lauren Dubinsky, Senior Reporter | December 19, 2016
Philips Healthcare's IntelliSpace
Console Critical Care
From the December 2016 issue of HealthCare Business News magazine
One in five Americans die in the intensive care unit, according to a study published in the journal Critical Care Medicine. From the time patients are admitted to the hospital to the time they enter the ICU, they generate 100 data points per hour and clinicians struggle to interpret it. The Institute of Medicine’s 1999 landmark report estimated that the annual cost of preventable medical errors is between $17 billion and $29 billion.
“It’s a significant cost issue,” says Dr. Joe Frassica, chief medical and innovation officer at Philips Healthcare. “In that ICU setting, there are systems in place that invariably help or hinder the care process.” Over the last two years, Philips set out with its partners to figure out the source of this issue and to try to find a way to address it. They found that there’s too much data in a hospital’s EMR for one person to adequately review. “We have done a great job at collecting the data in the EMR, but having all that comprehensive data put in front of you is equivalent to having a record that’s the size of a warranty,” says Frassica. “Somewhere in the text is something that’s very important for you to know, but it’s impossible to know which page it’s on.”
In March, Philips launched its cloud-based clinical decision support dashboard for the ICU called IntelliSpace Console Critical Care. It gathers information from multiple systems and EMRs that can be analyzed and prioritized. It provides clinicians with an overview of each patient in the ICU, including their acuity level, details regarding life support and other important information they need to make decisions.
IntelliSpace Console is the result of a multi-year research collaboration with Ambient Clinical Analytics and the Mayo Clinic. A multi-site clinical trial funded by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) was recently completed. The trial found that IntelliSpace Console significantly improved the performance and efficiency of ICU patient workup. It saved about 110 minutes per day on data gathering in the surgical ICU.
Should your hospital get on board?
Over the past five years, the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act pushed the implementation of EMR. Today, most hospitals have the infrastructure to collect data within a basic EMR. As hospitals become increasingly familiar with the technology, they realize that not everything they want to do can be done within the EMR, and that decision support tools are needed to fill that gap, according to Frassica.
