A clinical event as defined by Jane M. Carrington PhD, RN, Assistant Professor at the University of Arizona, College of Nursing www.nursing.arizona.edu, is a sudden and unexpected change in a patient’s condition. This can include pain, bleeding, fever, respiratory status or levels of consciousness linked to a higher risk of unexpected patient death.
Sometimes, even though there can be a vast amount of information contained in EHRs, important patient information can be overlooked when verbal face-to-face handoffs are used with patients. Dr. Carrington received a grant for $745,417 from NIH’s National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering www.nibib.nih.gov as part of the NSF/NIH “Smart and Connected Health Program” http://obssr.od.nih.gov/scientific_areas/smartconnect-health.aspx to improve nurse communications on clinical events by improving existing EHR technology.
“We’re going to use the words nurses use to record patient care to trigger an alert when a clinical event is imminent or occurring along with the degree of severity,” reports Dr. Carrington. “Our goal is to teach the computer how to read nursing language and recognize when an alert should be issued.”
Dr. Carrington is working with the University of Arizona School of Information Science, Technology and Arts, http://sisla.arizona.educ and with the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Chicago www.cs.uic.edu.
The goal is to collect and translate data into a smart algorithm using machine learning and natural language processing and then use innovative visualization strategies to enhance nurse-to-nurse communication on clinical events.
“Once, we’ve completed our first round of data collection, we will use specific nursing terms to describe patients,” said Dr. Carrington. “We anticipate that using specific nursing terms will create a smart algorithm that will teach the computer to distinguish between an event and a non-event so as to know when to trigger and not to trigger an alert.”