New Technology Saving Babies

A new technology being used in the NICU at the University of California San Diego Health http://health.ucds.edu is able to predict the risk of life-threatening infections for up to 24 hours before they appear in severely premature or critically ill infants.

The “Heart Rate Observation (HeRO) system www.heroscore.com  is a monitoring technology that uses an algorithm to detect slight changes in a baby’s heart beat that could be an early sign of a major infection. It can be used to determine sepsis which is a bacterial infection that is highly dangerous to babies born that weigh three pounds or less.

“The challenge with diagnosing sepsis is that symptoms found in the early stages of the infection are subtle and nonspecific,” said Erika Fernandez, MD, Director of the NICU at UC San Diego Health. “With the HeRO technology, we can detect sepsis up to 24 hours before the infection actually happens so we can intervene before a baby becomes critically ill.”

The HeRO system uses a zero to seven surveillance score generated after a heart rate is analyzed. If the score is higher than a two, then an alert is sent out for a possible infection. According to Lawrence Prince, MD, PhD, Chief of the Division of Neonatology at UC San Diego Health, “The technology is expected to reduce mortality rates in the NICU by 20 percent.”