Digital ICU: Hospital Sant Joan de Déu Fundació Althaia
Hospital profile
- Center that provides healthcare to a population of about 280,000 people.
- ICU that treats about 1,300 critically ill patients a year.
- A highly complex clinical environment with a high demand for care.
Challenges
- Fragmented clinical information, coming from multiple medical devices.
- Difficulty in providing a longitudinal view of the patient's condition.
- Limitations to exploiting data for advanced clinical research purposes.
Key Results
- Automatic integration of critical patient vital signs.
- Limited ability to anticipate and identify relevant clinical changes.
- Promotion of advanced clinical research in intensive care.
Hospital Sant Joan de Déu – Fundació Althaia has turned its ICU into a digital ICU: BC Link® automatically integrates vital signs from monitors, ventilators and infusion pumps, with no manual data entry, while BC Workstation® and BC Tracker® display them continuously to intensivists. The hospital has worked with Better Care since 2014.
Context
Hospital Sant Joan de Déu – Fundació Althaia provides healthcare to approximately 280,000 people in Central Catalonia. The hospital records around 33,000 admissions each year, while its Intensive Care Unit manages around 1,300 critically ill patients annually across 20 ICU beds.
Challenges: fragmented clinical data in the ICU
As in any ICU environment, the clinical condition of critically ill patients can change within minutes, requiring decisions to be based on accurate, continuous and reliable information.
However, the ICU needed a system capable of reconstructing the complex clinical data landscape generated by heterogeneous medical devices and transforming it into actionable information for everyday clinical practice.
A digital ICU with BC Link®, BC Workstation® and BC Tracker®
Since 2014, Hospital Sant Joan de Déu – Fundació Althaia has relied on Better Care as a strategic technological partner for its ICU.
At the heart of the project is BC Link®, an interoperability platform that automatically collects, integrates and structures all vital signs and clinical data generated by critically ill patients.
Through BC Link®, data from patient monitors, ventilators and infusion pumps are automatically integrated into the hospital’s IT systems. Its technological capabilities ensure the quality, consistency and traceability of clinical information, allowing all records to be documented in a precise and structured way without manual data entry.
Building on this unified data foundation, solutions such as BC Workstation® and BC Tracker® allow intensivists at Hospital Sant Joan de Déu – Fundació Althaia to maintain continuous monitoring, follow-up and visualization of the patient’s clinical status.
Clinical value: what a digital ICU brings
The advanced visualization capabilities of this data have led to a significant shift in clinical practice within the ICU.
Today, healthcare providers can:
- Analyze the evolution of patients receiving mechanical ventilation.
- Identify and review critical hemodynamic events retrospectively.
- Detect clinically relevant patterns and changes that previously went unnoticed.
More specifically, BC Link® enables retrospective analysis of thousands of respiratory cycles, facilitating the detection and study of patient–ventilator asynchronies.
Impact on clinical research and innovation
The availability of high-resolution clinical data has opened the door to new lines of research, particularly in the field of mechanically ventilated critically ill patients.
This has contributed to a paradigm shift in critical care, reinforcing the role of clinical data as a central pillar for improving patient safety, advancing clinical practice and driving healthcare innovation.
Conclusion
Better Care solutions enable intensivists at Hospital Sant Joan de Déu – Fundació Althaia to look beyond connected devices and transform clinical data into knowledge that supports their decision-making in diagnosis, treatment and patient safety through a digital ICU.
Want to see how the same technology extends critical care across an entire region? Discover how the regional tele-ICU works in Arnau de Vilanova University Hospital in Lleida (Spain). And if you would like to see a digital ICU in your hospital, request a demo!
