The IISPV research group led by Dr. Bodì won INNOBICS grant to improve Intensive Care Units in hospitals

The Intensive Care (IC) Unit research group led by Dr Bodí at the University Hospital of Tarragona Joan XXIII (UCI23), has been awarded a competitive innovation grant (INNOBICS) by the Institut Català de la Salut (ICS) for the development of a IC Units data exploitation platform.

Despite the richness of data available at Clinical Information Systems (CIS), the type and quality of data is too variable to bring benefit beyond existing standards of care. The UCI23 group, an internationally renowned group in the secondary use of CIS data, will create a tool to implement at all ICS hospitals.

Up to date the entry of the data collected from bedside equipment monitoring, results from additional tests (ex. imaging, blood tests, etc.), clinical information on patients progress remains manual and there are no automatisation processes to test performance. IC clinicians have long acknowledged that CIS are being underused, but automatisation requires a cultural shift and the creation of new roles (i.e. data scientists in the clinics). Some MS have undergone this shift (ex. Netherlands, UK and Belgium), promoting benchmarking processes, with an associated impact in survival rates.

IC Medical Associations agree on the need to use common indicators to monitor quality of care across Units, but the lack of standardisation procedures impedes benchmark practices. There is a need for decision making models that increase the standards of quality of care across IC Units whilst predicting behaviour of IC patients and promoting patient stratification.

The UCI23 team will develop a tool that will allow access to this data, generate automatic reports on the service provided to patients,  create automatic process (AP) and quality (CI) indicators. This will safe significant time to clinical staff whilst allow benchmarking to improve the quality of healthcare by implementing tools that will support clinical desicionmaking.