Hacking pediatric medicine

by Nancy Fliesler

Want to hack something in medicine? Vendors are increasingly eager to contribute their tools to problem-solving teams, like those who will gather November 14 for Boston Children’s Hospital’s Hacking Pediatrics. Seeing an array of tools presented at a showcase at Boston Children’s last week, I felt excited about the possibilities ahead.

Here are a few tools that can help innovators improve health care for patients, caregivers and providers.

• Data capture: Data are generated everywhere—doctors’ clinical notes, wearable devices, even patient beds—but are maddeningly hard to gather. Technologies like speech recognition systems and natural language processing allow health systems and researchers to cast a wider net when seeking to understand their patients. Nuance’s Clintegrity 360 | NarrativeSearch, for example, converts clinical notes or dictation to structured, usable data.
• Data integration: A variety of platforms, some with data capture tools built in, bring together and present data from disparate sources to facilitate discovery and decision-making. One project, for example, is taking data from vital signs trackers worn by nurses at a trauma center—specifically, signs of fatigue—and crunching them against patient safety parameters to inform quality improvement efforts. (In the short term, the trackers could signal nurse managers that it’s time for a break.)
• data analytics systems can help health care providers “transform their data into intelligent action.” For example, throughMicrosoft, Dartmouth-Hitchcock Health System’sImagineCareprogram is coupling analytics with remote patient monitoring, looking for patterns and gauging the probability of untoward events so providers can head them off. At Johns Hopkins, Microsoft is poweringProject Emerge, which takes data from patient records and monitoring equipment to create a “harms monitor” for the surgical ICU.

Read the full post on Vector: A banquet of tools for health tech innovators

The opinions expressed in this blog post are the author’s only and do not necessarily reflect those of MassDevice.com or its employees.

The post Hacking pediatric medicine appeared first on MassDevice.

from MassDevice http://ift.tt/208i6Pf