Jeff Terry, global chief executive officer of GE Healthcare's Clinical Command Center, said the system, which they created in partnership with the local health department, is capable of processing 4.2 million data points per day, covering 7,368 beds and about 800 ventilators in 60 local hospitals, and updating the data every five minutes.
In June 2020, a study published in the journal CriticalCareExplorations showed that in just two weeks, the system covered 90 percent of Oregon's hospitals.
This system is the first of its kind in the United States.
Chemistry from an idea
March 14, 2020 - It occurred to a supervisor at Oregon Health & Science University's Mission Control Center that, with new cases of coronavirus pneumonia sweeping the nation today, it would be nice to have a system that ****ed up the number of beds and the medical equipment, so that doctors could know how many beds and ventilators are left in each hospital.
That night, Oregon Health & Science University's mission control consulting team at GE's Medical Command Center developed an outline of the plan.
Oregon Health & Science University Hospital's Senior Deputy Chief Medical Officer for Patient Management, Matthias Johannes Merkel, said that previously, Oregon, like other states, manually confirmed other hospitals' bed balance data. That manual confirmation was useful for reporting purposes, but because the data was "outdated," it was meaningless in the event of an emergency, such as a patient's urgent need to be transferred during an outbreak.
Challenges to realization
Merkel said there were three major challenges behind Oregon's success.
The first was convincing hospitals to ***share the data.
Merkel revealed that while clinicians immediately recognized the advantages of the system, convincing those in power at hospitals to share their own data faced obstacles. "The biggest challenge is to find a reason for hospitals to give up competition and ****enjoy their own data, but to their own advantage." Because, as even health department leaders in Portland, Oregon, are wondering, is this really a good idea?
Terry said the move to transparent data across hospitals is a landmark. In normal times, large hospitals are in competition with each other; they do work together, but it's more of a competition. So the fact of the matter is that getting Oregon's hospitals to work together is an almost impossible challenge.
Merkel added that, fortunately, in the end, all the hospitals agreed that ****enjoying the information under the outbreak was a definite benefit.
Second, the technological challenge.
Terry said, "In Oregon, the reason it's hard to automate the healthcare system is that it's hard to get data outside of electronic medical record data, and almost every hospital uses a different IT system. The 60 hospitals that have joined the *** Enjoy Bed Balance System involve about 40 different IT systems. We also need to come up with a new way to extract hospital data. This method of extraction has to be fast enough and, more importantly, low enough risk that it doesn't extract patient health information."
The study in the journal CriticalCareExplorations shows that researchers at Oregon Health & Science University quickly solved the first critical step in the technique in an hour.
Third, the funding challenge.
Oregon Health & Science University's Mission Control Center is the system's information hub, where all the data is aggregated.
Behind the huge amount of data are huge technology costs. The Oregon Health & Science University Foundation says the resulting technology is funded by them and is not on OHSU's shoulders.
How the new system works
Merkel said all the information in the system is displayed by region. Hospitals using the system can access the information by accessing a specific Web site through a cell phone or other Web-enabled device. At Oregon Health & Science University's Mission Control Center, researchers projected the data onto an electronic screen.
The system's data shows ventilator margins, as well as the availability of 13 types of beds, including the number of beds in the adult intensive care unit, pediatric intensive care unit, and negative-pressure beds, with plans to add data on emergency department beds in the future.
Each hospital uses the system differently. Many hospitals use it as part of their daily patrols or emergency operations meetings; some check the system from time to time to get a sense of their receiving capacity; and others wait until they are about to exceed their available capacity to check the system to see if there are other options.
Terry said, "In the event of a surge of patients with new cases of crown pneumonia, senior nurse practitioners like Merkel use the system to lead the hospitals, as well as the temporary hospitals, in rationalizing patient transfers. Likewise, the system is capable of responding to other catastrophic events."
Beginning with an epidemic, more than an epidemic
Now, Oregon Health & Science University is still exploring uses for the system beyond the new Crown Pneumonia outbreak, especially in particular areas, such as pediatric burn intensive care units. This comes on the heels of the tragic and unprecedentedly large wildfires in Oregon, where real-time *** enjoyment of information about bed availability has already demonstrated its benefits.
Merkel believes that the new crown pneumonia epidemic will one day pass, while the demand for beds for burn victims like this is long-term. The system helps doctors serve patients more effectively.
In the future, Oregon's trauma care medical will also be information ****ed, and they will continue to study it in the future to try to better integrate the system with other emergency operations.
Merkel said the system has spawned many other collaborations. Several phone calls are now made each week by the hospitals' marketing directors. Merkel hopes that people will learn from the outbreak and build a stronger health care system and response mechanism.
General Electric Healthcare said that following Oregon's success, Florida will launch its own data ****enjoyment system at the end of September.
AdventHealth, HCA Healthcare and Tampa General Hospital all have command centers in Florida. The health care organizations hope to develop similar systems under the leadership of the Florida Agency for Health Care Administration and have already reached out to GE Healthcare partners.
Terry predicted that other U.S. states are likely to follow Florida's lead, with statewide data ****ownership and eventually a nationwide system.
Original Source:HealthLeaders
Original Title:COVID-19: OREGONHOSPITALSSHAREDATA, CREATEREAL-TIMEBEDCAPACITYSYSTEM