A study being conducted at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine’s www.med.upenn.edu Center for Healthcare Innovation http://healthcareinnovation.upenn.edu is examining how to implement an automated cloud-based system able to interpret long term ICU EEG data to speed response to changes in patient conditions.
It has been shown in recent studies that a large percentage of ICU patients have seizures, brain ischemia, encephalopathy, or other conditions that can be detected early on by an EEG, allowing therapy to be initiated promptly.
A team led by Brian Litt, MD, Professor in Neurology and Bioengineering has built an automated cloud-based platform for ICU EEG interpretation called “Pennsieve” http://healthcareinnovation.upenn.edu/projects/pensieve. When a seizure is detected by the algorithm, a notification is sent to the patient’s care team immediately, so action can be taken sooner.
In another project at Penn Medicine, a team at Penn Medicine is harnessing the convenience of smartphones, wireless blood pressure monitoring technology, and EHRs to more closely monitor the blood pressure of post-partum patients after they go home from the hospital.
Still in its early stages, the project ultimately intends to show that tracking patients’ blood pressure in the first seven days following delivery could help to identify health problems early and improve outcomes.
Using an Apple Health app, patients sent blood pressure data taken with a wireless blood pressure device twice daily to Penn clinicians. They also go to a nurse for a blood pressure check one week after delivery which is the current standard of care at Penn Medicine for patients who have high blood pressure post-partum.
“Patients without iPhones can still report data through online tools, but the process isn’t as seamless as it is through the Apple health app”, according to the Principal Investigator, Chileshe Nkonde-Price, MD, cardiologist and on the faulty at the Penn Medicine Center for Healthcare Innovation.
The data is then fed into the patient’s record in PennChart, an Epic System EHR used by Penn Medicine. The project currently in the proof-of-concept phase is gathering data on the characteristics of participating patients to determine whether the data is timely and whether patients are compliant.
For example, Dr. Nkonde-Price received an EHR alert notifying her of a patient’s dangerously high blood pressure, prompting her to call the patient to advise that she immediately reach out to her treating physician. The patient was admitted to the hospital for treatment of post-partum preeclampsia, a rare condition.