Innovation in the ICU and optimisation of critical care
Hospital profile
- Healthcare centre serving a population of approximately 280,000 people in Central Catalonia.
- ICU managing around 1,300 critically ill patients per year.
- A highly complex clinical environment with demanding care requirements.
Challenges
- Fragmented clinical information generated by multiple medical devices.
- Limited ability to obtain a longitudinal view of patient status.
- Difficulties in leveraging clinical data for advanced research purposes.
Key Results
- Automatic integration of vital signs for critically ill patients.
- Improved ability to anticipate, identify and prevent clinically significant events.
- Stronger capacity for advanced clinical research in intensive care.
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.
The challenge
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
The solution
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 Mview®, BC Workstation® and BC Tracker® allow intensivists at Hospital Sant Joan de Déu – Fundació Althaia to maintain continuous monitoring, follow-up and visualisation of the patient’s clinical status.
Clinical value
The advanced visualisation capabilities of this data have led to a significant shift in clinical practice within the ICU.
Today, healthcare providers can:
- Analyse the evolution of patients receiving mechanical ventilation.
- Identify and review critical haemodynamic 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, transform clinical data into knowledge and convert that knowledge into decisions that improve diagnosis, treatment and patient safety.
