MARKHAM, ONT. – IBM Corp. (NYSE: IBM) hosted its second annual research and innovation summit last week where attendees were introduced to the Artemis Project, a research initiative by The Hospital for Sick Children (Sick Kids) with support from IBM and the University of Ontario Institute of Technology (UOIT).
The Artemis Project is a research project made possible by a group of international researchers, led by Carolyn McGregor, Canada research chair in health informatics at UOIT, using IBM software to help create a solution that would help doctors detect the health conditions of critically ill, premature babies.
McGregor said the Artemis Project is all about research and innovation for critical care.
“Hospitals are drowning in vast quantities of information that’s mainly paper-based and complex,” McGregor said. “We have a huge opportunity to help with that information flow to provide hospitals with the information and data analysis that they need.”
Andrew James, the associate clinical director, NICU (neonatal intensive care unit) at Sick Kids, is one of the physicians involved with the study.
“Hospitals are ever-changing environments that are filled with lots of uncertainty and disruptions,” James said. The type of information environment we deal with still involves documenting data with paper-based notes, and usually at 60-minute intervals, which often results in a magnitude of data loss.”
In the past, James said the main information problem for clinicians was having to deal with data everywhere. These days, he said it’s a matter of not having access to the information they need in order to do their jobs.
What today’s hospitals need is access to intelligent data analysis so doctors can make better predictions regarding the onset of possible medical conditions. As a result, James said doctors could then minimize the predicted conditions or even work to prevent their occurrence.
In many cases today, nurses are often wheeling laptops from bedside to bedside to get the information they need. With a solution that would provide in real-time, multi-patient information from a multi-stream environment, a lot of time and lives could possibly be saved, she added.
Last August, Artemis was deployed on eight concurrent neonatal ICU bed spaces at Sick Kids. With the help of the bedside devices, nurses and doctors were able to capture critical and real-time information such as monitoring heart rates. James said the implementation has been successful thus far and the hospital is looking to also capture other types of data in the future.
With IBM software built into the solution, the medical devices are able to capture and process hundreds of readings every second to better help doctors and nurses with their observances.
“With a patient management system, we’re able to gather generic information and now have intelligent data analysis and patient-specific information,” he said. “This allows doctors to assess, plan and intervene in a more predictive manner.”
Moving forward, Sick Kids hospital is looking to deploy Artemis to all of its patients in the NICU. On a larger scale, McGregor said UOIT is currently working on a cloud-based solution to enable the solution to spread nationally and beyond borders into the U.S. market as well.
Internationally-speaking, McGregor said she’s sees “great potential” for the Artemis cloud solution in other areas of the world such as in developing countries.
“The Artemis cloud solution has great potential, especially in developing countries so it can help save lives by helping to support doctors with technology instead of having them drown in information,” she said.
Follow Maxine Cheung on Twitter: @MaxineCheungCDN.
