US Army awards LiveData grant to develop integrated clinical 'plug
and play' patient safety system
14 October 2009
The US Army Telemedicine and Advanced Technology Research Center
(TATRC) has awarded a $730,000 research grant to LiveData, Inc. to
develop an integrated clinical environment with the Center for
Integration of Medicine and Innovative Technology's (CIMIT) Medical
Device Plug-and-Play (MD PnP) team.
Together with its CIMIT/MGH partners, LiveData is developing
MD-ICEMAN, an architecture for integrating medical technologies.
MD-ICEMAN is an implementation of the Integrated Clinical Environment
(ICE), reflecting early involvement with the standard, and its further
development will continue to inform the ICE architecture and associated
standards.
MD-ICEMAN will:
- Integrate and coordinate medical devices in an
interoperable patient-centric medical system (using a standardized
API embracing a possibly enhanced ISO/IEEE 11073 protocol); and,
- Present to the clinical team critical information about
the patient’s condition and detect meaningful changes in patient
condition (workflow and context-aware Smart Notifications).
Although concentrating initially on the operating room (OR), the
results are expected to benefit patients throughout the continuum of
care including improvement in workflow, reductions in medical errors in
particular and healthcare costs in general, and providing real-time
comprehensive data for electronic medical records (EMR).
The system will support such specific advances in patient safety as
medical device safety interlocks and physiologic closed-loop control of
medication fluid delivery, and ventilation.
The work, known as ICEMAN, is related to LiveData’s focus on
developing workflow enhancements for its OR-Dashboard, which can lead to
significant improvements in patient safety and OR efficiency through
on-time case starts, reduced downtime, and automating many manual
activities.
Improved scheduling, another benefit, will result in reducing
clinical staff time spent on non-clinical activities. Improvements in
record-keeping will increase patient charge capture, a significant
benefit for ongoing hospital operations, particularly during times of
economic stress.
“Massachusetts General Hospital, CIMIT, and LiveData have long been
collaborating on important medical technology. The development of
MD-ICEMAN is a valuable stepping stone in advancing the implementation
of a standardized plug-and-play medical environment where individual
devices are integrated to enhance patient safety and workflow
efficiency,” said Dr. Julian Goldman, MD, Director of the MD PnP program
at CIMIT, Medical Director of Biomedical Engineering for Partners
HealthCare System, and attending anesthesiologist at Massachusetts
General Hospital.
“Using an architecture that supports and is compliant with the
emerging ASTM ICE standard (F2761), MD-ICEMAN will enable operating
rooms and other treatment centers to rapidly and flexibly reconfigure
diagnostic and treatment devices to meet the specific needs of each
medical procedure.”
“While improvements in perioperative systems design will lead to
increased OR efficiency and OR throughput, the ultimate objective of the
ICEMAN project is to advance patient safety,” said Dr. Warren Sandberg,
MD, Ph.D., associate professor of anesthesia, Harvard Medical School,
and director of the Operating Room of the Future (ORF) project at
Massachusetts General Hospital.
“By advancing standards for medical device connectivity, the
MD-ICEMAN architecture will provide a platform for further reducing OR
complications and demonstrate the potential for a hospital to
accommodate their patients’ needs, as well as hospital finances.”
“The issues of patient safety are well-known and all-too-much in the
news these days,” said Ronald Marchessault Jr., Director for Technology
Transfer/Commercialization for the Telemedicine and Advanced Technology
Research (TATRC) Center, US Army Medical Research and Material Command.
“The ICEMAN project is a natural outgrowth of ORF. TATRC and the SBIR
process facilitate technology development within smaller companies,
which can be more nimble and innovative than their larger counterparts.”
In use at such leading institutions as Massachusetts General
Hospital, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, and NewYork-Presbyterian
Hospital, LiveData OR-Dashboard captures, synthesizes, and displays all
relevant information about the surgical case. The grant responds to the
strong national argument in favour of standards, and will support the
use of ICEMAN to replace proprietary interfaces with the evolving
standard.
“When multiple devices and technologies are involved, the issues of
patient safety demand a strong, standards-based foundation. Our
experience with MGH and success with OR-Dashboard have shown that
LiveData can lead development of vital technology that will become the
basis for an industry standard,” said Jeffrey Robbins, CEO.
“LiveData’s approach to integration obtains value from the data by
giving it context. We are proud to have earned TATRC's confidence and
ongoing support.”
Once the system is demonstrated and assessed for its impact on OR
efficiency and patient safety, LiveData will continue to participate in
medical device interoperability standards development.
This SBIR award represents a natural progression from prior SBIR
awards. LiveData OR-Dashboard, jump-started with the support of $1.3
million in TATRC grants, provides the software foundation for ICEMAN. In
2007, LiveData received a Phase I SBIR grant that conceptualized the
work that has now begun under Phase II. Besides the workflow alert
manager, the project is expected to further the development of an
IT-extensible user interface for the OR-Dashboard patient safety system.
TATRC and the SBIR Program
The US Army Telemedicine and Advanced Technology Research Center
(TATRC) has played a prominent role in developing advanced technologies
in such areas as: health informatics; medical imaging; mobile computing
and remote monitoring; and simulation and training.
TATRC has also played an important role in championing organizations
such as The American Telemedicine Association (ATA) during its early
years, and has continued to be an important thought leader in areas such
as the use of virtual reality tools, biomaterials and
hospital-of-the-future concepts.
TATRC has been exploring and implementing telemedicine and other
advanced medical technology solutions for over 15 years. By exploring
new developments, TATRC strives to improve health care for the US Armed
Forces, their families and the public sector.
Currently, TATRC manages more than $250 million annually, primarily
through congressional special interest funding, and has expanded from
its original office at Fort Detrick, Maryland, to a more global presence
with offices in Georgia, California, Hawaii and Europe.
Equally important has been TATRC’s partnership with numerous
universities, commercial enterprises, and other federal agencies,
supporting approximately 500 ongoing research projects. TATRC’s vision,
as an important extension of its legacy, encompasses the creation of
opportunities for technology transfer to the public sector as well as
the battlefield.
Under SBIR (Small Business Innovation Research Program), a portion of
a federal agency's research and development effort is reserved for award
to small business concerns through a uniform process having a first
phase for determining the scientific and technical merit and feasibility
of ideas that appear to have commercial potential, a second phase to
further develop proposals which meet particular program needs, and when
appropriate, a third phase in which commercial applications of R&D are
funded by non-federal sources of capital.
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