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Thanks to the creation of a software system, it will be possible to predict possible critical events of the patient in the ICU, making it easier for the healthcare professional to make decisions.
It will also have an important impact on patient progress, since it will also allow a silent prediction of the evolution of the patient's condition, reducing sound pollution within ICUs.
Today, healthcare professionals have access to numerous patient vital signs in Intensive Care Units (ICU); they have large amounts of data that are not organized, connected or hierarchized among them. For this reason, the international research project IHI SASICU aims to develop and validate a software system for clinical decision support (CDSS) that evaluates the cardiopulmonary interactions of patients who are in the ICU and the prediction of possible critical events.
This initiative, funded by the Innovative Health Initiative (IHI) foundation, is being developed by Dräger, a leading international company in the fields of medical technology and safety, with the collaboration of the Hospital Clínic de Barcelona, responsible for the project, and Better Care, a biotechnology company that develops AI-based software solutions. Better Care will be the company responsible for connecting, processing and storing ICU data and developing algorithms that analyze patient status to support clinicians in making decisions about the evaluation of heart-lung interactions in critically ill patients, as well as developing an interface to show the algorithm proposals to healthcare professionals.
“We have a total budget of close to 18 million euros and we appreciate the trust placed by IHI. This figure highlights the need to provide data-based therapeutic support and the importance of system interoperability,” says Michael Wilkening, Vice President of Strategy and Business Development at Dräger.
As a result, this project will create a clinical decision support system (CDSS) that will analyze the lung-heart interaction in the patient based on changes in mechanical ventilation and cardiovascular support and will predict possible critical events, facilitating decision-making for the healthcare professional and providing better care for patients.
“It is important to have the secure exchange of data between different electronic devices and computer systems for clinical practice, such as the clinical decision support system (CDSS),” according to Michael Wilkening.
In addition, this technological tool will have an important impact on patient progress, since it will also allow a silent prediction of the evolution of the patient's condition, reducing sound pollution within ICUs. In this sense, silent ICUs are the future of intensive care units due to the multiple benefits they offer to patients and healthcare professionals, such as humanizing the environment, not interrupting sleep, reducing stress and anxiety or eliminating the sense of danger derived from device alerts, etc. A trend considering that ICUs exceed the noise levels recommended by the WHO.
We are very proud to be able to collaborate on this project with so much potential and so innovative. We seek to create a new paradigm of silent ICUs, with more information and more data in real time, capable of supporting clinicians in decision-making and of predicting events that may happen to critically ill patients,” says Xavier García Ordóñez, CEO of Better Care.
Mechanical ventilation at the heart of the project
The IHI SASICU research project focuses on the incorporation of new technological methods for mechanical ventilation (VM), an essential component of intensive care, since it provides critically ill patients who cannot maintain adequate oxygenation or ventilation on their own.
Specifically, it is essential to monitor the hemodynamics of patients with VM and adjust the ventilator parameters accordingly to optimize heart-lung interaction.
“Collaborating in the IHI SASICU project means continuing to make progress in the evolution and improvement of patient care and monitoring,” says Xavier García Ordóñez.
