BOSTON – An operation on a patient produces a constant stream of important information. Caregivers must work together as a team to process this information and make important decisions based on what they see.
That’s how it’s supposed to work. But in the real world, clinicians may just see snippets of disconnected data. And worse, they may barely know who else is in the operating suite with them.
In one operating room at Massachusetts General Hospital, a 42-inch LCD screen, serving as a data dashboard, is trying to solve some of those vexing problems. During operations, it shows trend lines of crucial patient information and other relevant data.
It’s more than just a pretty picture. Underlying the screen full of data is information technology that holds significant promise within healthcare IT.
The technology under the hood has been developed by LiveData Inc., a Cambridge, Mass.-based technology vendor that has developed applications for manufacturing and electric generation. LiveData adapted its technology for healthcare to participate in the Operating Room of the Future, a project of the Center for Integration of Medicine and Innovative Technology, or CIMIT.
The company says its experience in capturing real-time data in other industries can be just as useful in healthcare.
In the operating room, that means pulling information from a variety of monitoring equipment, while also gathering data from the patient’s record. That’s what’s projected on the screen in the operating room.
“The display is passive in that we don’t require any new keyboarding,” said Jeff Robbins, CEO of LiveData. “The system automatically taps into all the IT and monitoring going on.”
Trending the data is vitally important to all participants in a surgery, said Warren Sandberg, MD, assistant professor of anesthesia at Harvard Medical School and co-program leader of the operating room of the future project.
“With key physiological data being trended, you can see where the patients are now and where they’ve been,” he said. “When you track physiological information and data from monitoring equipment, it’s really important to see the interactions between settings and physiology.”
The monitor also shows data from a location tracking system. Staff members wear RFID badges, and their names show on the screen. Clinicians have reported it’s useful to know who is in the room during a procedure.
LiveData’s aggregation technology is based on standards. Information is collected and gathered in an SQL format, which is available to researchers for analysis, Robbins said. He said the company has plans to port the technology into the intensive care unit and emergency department.
