Critical Role of Health IT in Pediatrics and NICU

Pediatrics is a completely different type of care than adults. Just as it requires specialized medical knowledge, it also requires specialized healthcare information technology.

Tracy Warren is co-founder and CEO of Astart Medical, a vendor of pediatric digital devices. Healthcare IT News Warren for an in-depth look at pediatrics and technology, discussing steps to ensure clinical staff are using the best data, the pace of technology innovation in pediatric care, health How IT Could Curb the Highest Ever Rate in Premature Births. Clinical care teams can use US and best practices to prevent lapses and medical errors in the neonatal intensive care unit.

Q. Data and the way it is applied in clinical settings is helping to improve care. But there are challenges with the quality of the data and the way it is presented. What steps can be taken to ensure that clinical staff are using the best, most useful data?

One. The interesting thing about the shift to AI and machine learning is that people are ignoring the fact that data quality from the EHR is actually a rate-limiting factor. Because EHRs are billing systems that are not designed to support patient care, patient care data is inconsistently documented in flow-sheet rows adapted to multiple locations, and often prepared with typographical errors or omissions. is done.

Additionally, most actual patient assessment and ordering is unstructured free text, making data quality highly variable and difficult to interpret with existing natural language processing solutions. As a result, companies may need clinical experts to interpret, translate, and transform.

With the advent of EHR-integrated technologies, there is a second look at EHR data, and, for solutions that provide real-time access to the data, a quality-monitoring system may be in place that allows clinical teams to Enables you to alert to anomalies. and gaps in the data. From there, teams can make adjustments and enhance data quality while improving processes to reduce variability.

Q. Some in the industry say innovation in pediatric care is slow. What is your opinion? And if slow, what do you think is keeping this part of healthcare from adopting new technology?

One. As a former venture investor, it has long been a belief that “you can’t make a comeback in pediatrics because it’s a small market.” The FDA and other organizations have worked hard to accelerate innovation by reducing regulatory burdens, streamlining procedures, and creating financial incentives to pursue pediatric or rare disease pathways.

However, few investors who actively support investment in pediatrics limit innovation and negatively impact patient outcomes.

Children are more medically complex than ever, chronic diseases and conditions are on the rise, yet technologies that support clinical providers, patients and their families are lagging or not keeping pace.

Medical device and health IT sector majors are under pressure to focus on the large adult population, thereby hindering the market from offering end-to-end solutions to our children. Ultimately, reimbursement in the pediatric field has also created budget challenges for hospitals offering these services.

Medicaid and payers need to unite in support of our children’s health or else the burden of these challenges can have a sharp downstream effect.

Q. The March of Dimes released a report highlighting the all-time high rate of premature births in the US. How does this tax the resources in the neonatal care unit and what can be done through health care information technology to improve the delivery of care?

One. Not only are premature birth rates rising – driven by a combination of poor access to prenatal care, poor maternal health and aging mothers – the resources to support these critical babies have been destroyed by COVID-19 Were. The pandemic forced many professionals out of the industry, with most units reporting nursing shortages, limiting the ability to fill NICU beds.

The health care industry has long relied on human resources to provide care, but this is no longer viable. The system needs to start with a whiteboard on how care can be optimally delivered with the least amount of resources. In the NICU, revisit staffing ratios and remove mundane administrative activities from the clinical team that may be best served by technology and automation.

Taking advantage of the substantial investment many providers have made in their EHRs to increase operational efficiency will not be easy, but it is possible and can help existing NICU capacity support a larger number of infants.

Q. In the fast-paced NICU setting, communication is critical, especially as it pertains to the baby’s vital organs. In your experience, what best practices should clinical care teams use to prevent omissions and medical errors?

One. Access to information is paramount in any ICU setting, and medical teams have been able to improve communication in a number of ways. First, a unit-wide surveillance or monitoring system can provide a “war room”-like feature for monitoring complex patients, highlighting those at risk by automating criteria to efficiently direct resources based on key criticalities. Does

Second, we can break down data silos by freeing up data from the EHR, offering a comprehensive, longitudinal view of the patient. This may enable better adherence to practice guidelines while ensuring effective and consistent communication between the multidisciplinary teams present in the NICU.

Finally, alerting features have been used in the past, but need to be careful not to build up fatigue in the clinical team, to avoid alerting fatigue and further negative effects on clinical ordering and workflow. Do not fall

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