Philips and Mayo Clinic to use CMS Award to Reduce ICU Complications

The Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation (CMMI) has awarded a $16 million to Royal Philips Electronics, Andover, Mass, and the Mayo Clinic to improve critical care for Medicare and Medicaid beneficiaries in intensive care units (ICU). Data show that 27% of such Medicare beneficiaries face preventable treatment errors due to information overload among ICU providers.

The organizations will use cloud-based technology to help prevent medical errors by improving and standardizing clinical decision-making, enhancing patient monitoring, and better implementing quality metrics. Other participating centers include Duke University, University of Minnesota, Tufts Medical Center, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Albert Einstein Medical School, Montefiore Medical Center, and Lawrence General Hospital along with hospitals in Minnesota, Massachusetts, New York, and Oklahoma.

This system will leverage Philips’ IntelliBridge Enterprise as a single point of interoperability, acquiring, and aggregating critical data from the participating hospitals’ information systems and high-fidelity patient monitoring systems, including Philips IntelliVue monitors. The system promotes data standardization by creating a large, rich, normalized data set, allowing CMS and the participating hospitals to track on-the-fly performance measures further supporting comparative effectiveness and clinical research. Expansion of the system is also allowed, as additional applications can be deployed when technology evolves. Through secure encryption channels, ensuring both patient privacy protection and mobile delivery of data, the system is expected to support this cloud-based delivery model in any ICU in the US, or around the world.

Over a 3-year period, collaborators will train 1,440 existing ICU caregivers in four diverse hospital systems to effectively use new health information technologies to manage ICU patient care. The Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation estimates that this project will save more than $80 million while creating new healthcare jobs.