Beth Israel awarded $5.3M grant to target preventable harm in ICU

The Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation awarded Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) a $5.3 million grant to pursue a project that marries health IT, system science and patient engagement in an effort to eliminate preventable harm in the intensive care unit (ICU).

As a grant recipient, Boston-based BIDMC joins Johns Hopkins Medicine, the University of California San Francisco and Brigham & Women’s Hospital as part of the ICU Consortium to examine how to redesign the healthcare system to prevent pervasive problems.

During the 30-month project, a team of BIDMC clinicians and Massachusetts Institute of Technology system scientists will develop a model for measuring and managing the leading indicators of risk for harm in the ICU, including a dashboard system to raise clinicians’ awareness of conditions that may threaten patient safety, according to an announcement.

Specifically, the center will create checklists that will provide patient-specific information to clinicians to enable better decision-making. A separate interface facilitating communication between patients and families and providers in the ICU also will be developed.

“Critical care scorecards almost never include quantitative measures of patient’s perceptions of dignity and respect in the ICU,” said Daniel Talmor, MD, vice chair of the department of anesthesia, critical care and pain medicine and one of the principal investigators on the grant. "These innovations would enable open, real-time discussions between care providers, patients and family members in a critical care environment where, due to its complexity, this type of information has traditionally been available only to providers."

BIDMC plans to pilot select innovations from this project at Beth Israel Deaconess Hospital-Milton and Beth Israel Deaconess Hospital-Plymouth.