LiveData pitches in for OR of the Future

Mass High Tech: The Journal of New England Technology - July 16, 2004

by Dyke Hendrickson

 

One of the most infamous statistics in the medical world is the industry estimate that 98,000 patients die per year in U.S. hospitals because of mistakes.

A Cambridge company recently received an SBIR grant from the U.S. Army to develop a data-rich safety plan that will contribute to the flow of accurate information in the operating room.

The recipient of the $100,000 grant, LiveData Inc., will be working with Massachusetts General Hospital to implement the plan in MGH's Operating Room of the Future as part of a larger goal to improve safety in medical centers.

"Patient safety and accurate detection of medical programs is a very important issue," said Philip Brzezinski, principal researcher at LiveData.

"The Army has an interest because it runs 75 hospitals and is responsible for many medical facilities overseas. One of their goals is to improve care through better use of information." LiveData, founded in 1991, employs about 15. Company officials say it supplies software solutions to manufacturers, governmental organizations and medical centers.

Its entry into the life sciences field coincides with its relationship with MGH and Cambridge-based Center for the Integration of Medicine and Innovative Technology (CIMIT). CIMIT is composed of medical professionals from the Harvard teaching hospitals, MIT and Draper Laboratory. Much of its work focuses on the integration of communication technology into large hospitals. And one of its key projects is helping develop the Operating Room of the Future.

Mass General's operating room project is a living laboratory that explores new technology platforms and systems of care for performing minimally invasive surgical procedures.Its mandate states that "accurate data capture and analysis, multidisciplinary teamwork and thoughtful integration of technology are the building blocks for creating an environment that optimizes patient safety and comfort, staff satisfaction and financial efficiency." LiveData officials say that its integration software will make a difference in medical environments that require fast and accurate information.

According to company literature, LiveData was designed to interrogate massive amounts of real-time sensor data on a two-way basis while linking to legacy relational databases. Company officials say that an example of integration would be its ability to call up the medical history of an OR patient, and present on a monitor such information as heart rate, blood count, current medications and past operations.

Dr. Warren Sandberg, director of anesthesia in the operating room project, said that preventable medical efforts are a problem in health care today. The causes range from language barriers and staff shortages to system fragmentation and complexity.

"There is so much new technology coming in the operating rooms these days, and as a result a lot more information (about the patient), that it will be helpful to have a unit that can synthesize the material," Sandberg said.

"One key goal of the system is to archive the numbers relating to patient response so that if you do have a near-miss situation then you can go over the data to determine what happened."

LiveData officials say that one of the Army's motivations for participating in the SBIR grant is its desire to improve medical services in the field.

"The Army does much work behind the lines during confrontations," Brzezinski said. "They have interest in developing systems that provide accurate medical information quickly."

The Operating Room of the Future project represents a growing concern on the part of medical professionals about integrating data in medical facilities.

The Massachusetts Health Data Consortium recently launched a regional collaboration initiative designed to enable the exchange of health care data among distant hospitals and medical centers.

Thus if a comatose trauma victim from Hartford, Conn., were brought to a Massachusetts hospital, responders could access medical information from a Connecticut database and proceed with corrective care.