Renaissance Computing Institute

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Hospital Monitor

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Completed Projects

Hospital Monitoring System

Overview
When patients are checked into a hospital intensive care unit (ICU), they are monitored and given an overall assessment of their likelihood of recovery. The evaluation is helpful in determining which patients are the most critically ill or injured, however, current technology does not enable the ICU to update this initial assessment. Although heart rates, blood pressure and other vital signs are monitored in the unit, an overall continuous assessment that integrates many measurements of vital signs into an overall assessment of the patient’s condition is not routinely done. This makes it more difficult for doctors, nurses, and other caregivers to quickly be able to determine whether a patient is recovering or deteriorating.

RENCI is creating a new hospital monitoring system in collaboration with Keith Kocis, an MD in the pediatrics department of the UNC School of Medicine. The system will collect patient data in near real time and integrate it into a format that allows the ICU caregivers to understand the complex dynamic changes occurring in a patient’s condition almost instantaneously. Moreover, the new monitoring system will take advantage of advances in computer technology and bioinformatics that provide new and more detailed information about the patient and also adjust for the age and diagnosis of the patient. The tool, called REALTROMINS, will immediately show trends in a patient’s overall condition, allowing the healthcare team to intervene before a critical emergency occurs.

The RENCI Contribution
RENCI will help to integrate Realtromins into the pediatric intensive care unit (PICU) at the UNC hospital. RENCI will develop and test new algorithms and approaches to collecting and integrating data, and outputting it in a form that is useful for the care providers. RENCI will help Kocis’s research team evaluate the effectiveness of the new system in determining the prognosis for children in the PICU and in intervening before deterioration becomes acute. RENCI also will assist the research team in scaling up the system into a monitoring system through development of a prototype that can be used with both pediatric and adult ICU patients.

Funding
State of North Carolina

Collaborators
Keith Kocis, professor, department of pediatrics, North Carolina Children’s Health Center, UNC School of Medicine

Partners
UNC at Chapel Hill School of Medicine, North Carolina Children’s Health Center
UNC and NC State Joint Department of Biomedical Engineering
Multivariate, Inc.
Realtromins, Inc.

RENCI Team
Charles Schmitt, project leader
Erik Scott
Kevin Gamiel
Nassib Nassar
David Knowles