The impact of COVID-19 is challenging our healthcare system as never before.  Our hospital resources are being stretched beyond capacity.  Even basic supplies are in short supply impacting the normal patient care routine and infection control precautions.  Hospital ICU bed capacities are being expanded to areas of the hospital not designed for patients requiring intensive care.   As we learn more about the course of the COVID-19 infection, it has…

To say that the ICU is a complex and overwhelming environment is like saying that global warming is bad: technically correct but profoundly understated. Small margins for error combined with enormous consequences to survival and future quality of life make critical care medicine a high-stakes profession that is not for the faint of heart. If you step into an ICU, the relentless blinking displays from the myriad of devices will…

A decade ago, the idea of digitally replicating a human being sounded more fiction than fact. Fast forward several years and the concept of creating a digital replica of a living human being that changes as conditions change, has generated both heightened interest and ongoing support. These virtual copies of living organisms reveal insights into the important physiologic processes necessary for everyday living, and makes better sense of the data…

From improving quality of care to reducing costs, producing a concrete return on investment is becoming a crucial do or die milestone for health care systems and the health information technologies they use. A new study unveiled at the American College of Cardiology Conference is now a part of the growing evidence associating Etiometry’s platform with improvements in care quality and patient safety metrics. The abstract presented by Dr. Mary…

Keeping every patient alive is the most basic hospital mission; but how clinicians achieve this goal couldn’t be more complicated. Medical error is to blame for as many as 400,000 deaths in the U.S. each year, according to reports published in the Journal of Patient Safety. From adding alarms to adjusting protocols, changing the clinician’s physical environment isn’t the cure-all answer to patient safety concerns. To commemorate this National Patient Safety…

On my way back to Boston from this year’s Society of Critical Care Medicine conference, I cannot stop reflecting on the first time I attended this meeting back in 2015. It was in Phoenix, Arizona, a nice break from the cold Boston weather, just two weeks before the Super Bowl was held there. Besides the Patriots winning another Super Bowl, so much has changed between 2015 and 2019.  Back in…

In critical care environments, we are accustomed to seeing vital signs constantly rising and falling but a new study shows why doctors may not be seeing the full picture. Information Loss of Vital Physiologic Data in Critically Ill Patients outlines why the most fragile patients can also be the most susceptible to electronic health record errors. The study compared the information captured in the vital signs manually recorded in the EHR…

Education, experience, and intuition play a key role in how decisions are made around interventions and treatment selection for patients. But these decisions can only be as good as the data that was used to draw the assessment of the patient.  With more than 40 vital signs simultaneously reporting new measurements every second, critical care clinicians are drenched in data. For example, the 42-bed critical care unit at SickKids in…

There are more than 32,000 babies diagnosed with congenital heart defects each year in the United States alone. A quarter of these newborns will undergo some type of invasive procedure, surgery, or catheterization in the first year of life.  The tremendous advancements of pediatric cardiology in the last 30 years means that today more than 99% of these patients are expected to survive, with the prospect that with each coming year…

At Etiometry, we believe that biomedical device data should not be difficult to obtain. That’s why the new capabilities available as an add-on to our T3 Data Aggregation & Visualization software allow hospitals to easily capture and store high-frequency physiology data such as ECG information. This advancement allows medical researchers to access high-frequency biomedical device data to gain further insight into different physiological processes. Hospitals can now capture high-resolution physiological…