Johns Hopkins, Microsoft partner to improve HIT, ICU patient safety

The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and Microsoft will work together to develop a health IT solution that collects data from different monitoring equipment and identifies key trends aimed at preventing injuries and complications that can result from medical care.

The partnership will draw on the Johns Hopkins Armstrong Institute for Patient Safety and Quality's research on checklists to reduce infections and its pilot program called Project Emerge, which uses technology to restructure a hospital's workflow in an effort to eliminate the most common causes of preventable harm and promote better patient outcomes. Rather than focusing on one harm, according to the partnership announcement, Project Emerge seeks to eliminate all harms, including medical complications such as blood clots and pneumonia, as well as emotional harms like a lack of respect and dignity.

"Today's intensive care patient room contains anywhere from 50 to 100 pieces of medical equipment developed by different manufacturers that rarely talk to one another," says Peter Pronovost, senior vice president of patient safety and quality for Johns Hopkins Medicine and director of the Armstrong Institute. "We are excited to collaborate with Microsoft to bring interoperability to these medical devices, to fully realize the benefits of technology and provide better care to our patients and their families. By combining teamwork with technology designed to meet patients' and clinicians' needs, we can make care safer, less expensive and more joyful."

In collaboration with Microsoft, Johns Hopkins plans to revamp Project Emerge to better serve patients in intensive care environments. Johns Hopkins will supply the clinical expertise for the build, while Microsoft will provide advanced technologies, including Azure cloud platform and services, as well as software development expertise. Using Azure, the improved solution will collect and integrate information from several modern devices and provide critical analytics, computing, database, mobility, networking, storage and web functions. The end result will allow physicians to see trends in a patient's care in one centralized location and let them access critical patient information from any hospital-approved, Windows device. Pilot projects are estimated to begin next year.

This initiative is one of several collaborations between the two organizations designed to foster innovative, health-based technologies. Earlier this year, Microsoft became a sponsor of FastForward, Johns Hopkins' new business incubator designed to accelerate product development for health IT startup companies. Johns Hopkins also recently joined Microsoft's Partner Network, which provides enhanced services to the university.