U-M Weil Institute Partners with Leading Health Innovation Company, AirStrip®, to Accelerate Advancement of Predictive Analytics in Healthcare
The collaboration with AirStrip® will develop and bring to market a suite of software-based products to improve hospital efficiency and save patient lives.
Contact:
Megan VanStratt, Marketing Director, Weil Institute
vanstrat@umich.edu
(248) 912-7271
ANN ARBOR, MI and SAN ANTONIO, TX – The Weil Institute for Critical Care Research and Innovation at the University of Michigan announced that it has entered a research and licensing partnership with AirStrip®, the developer of an enterprise-grade platform for comprehensive medical data interoperability, analytics, and mobile virtual surveillance systems called AirStrip ONE®. The partnership includes a strategic investment by AirStrip into the Weil Institute data science unit, as well as the translation and commercialization of early warning systems called PICTURE – the Weil Institute’s suite of analytics that leverage electronic health record (EHR) data to predict patient deterioration in general floor hospital settings.
The AirStrip/Weil collaboration was catalyzed, in many ways, by the COVID-19 pandemic and resulting patient surges – emphasizing the urgent need for advanced clinical decision support systems that could help hospitals keep their teams safe while enabling more efficient management of patients and mobilization of resources. “AirStrip’s interoperability platform, AirStrip ONE provides clinicians with seamless access to near-real-time clinical and physiologic data - when and where they need it - via secure access controlled by the health system,” said AirStrip CEO Alan Portela. “Partnering with the Weil Institute will bring relevant and enriched information to AirStrip ONE with the same ease of access. Validated predictive tools like this are going to make a major difference.”
"This is the type of additive combination one hopes for; the best of innovative, leading-edge academic research coupled with the disciplined technical and commercialization skills to truly change patient care."
Drew Bennett
Director of Software and Content Licensing, U-M Innovation Partnerships
The Weil Institute’s PICTURE (Predicting ICU Transfer and Other Unforeseen Events) suite of machine learning algorithms utilizes EHR data to predict ICU transfer or death as a proxy for patient deterioration. PICTURE also provides explanations for every single prediction, adding transparency to the model and its calculations. Clinicians can use these explanations to guide decisions around patient care, such as moving a patient flagged as “at-risk” to a higher acuity unit before observable symptoms occur. As part of the partnership, the Weil team will also build and validate a series of additional adult and pediatric models of PICTURE that integrate near-real-time patient data from waveforms such as ECGs (electrocardiograms) and information from chest x-rays.
The collaboration seeks to advance the translation of early detection and predictive technologies into the marketplace that will enhance remote patient monitoring and staff efficiency, accelerate time to intervention, and reduce overall healthcare costs. “Introducing advanced clinical decision support will help hospitals to improve the care of acute patients — reducing length of stay, reducing readmissions and increasing clinical staff efficiency — this is how healthcare transformation starts,” said Portela. “These types of warning systems can prevent a patient from declining.” Portela further stresses that this partnership aims to do more than just building early warning systems. “We’re also building a physiologic phenotype so we can start moving more into a specific patient-centric model.”
Dr. Michael Sjoding, Weil Institute Associate Director and Associate Professor of Internal and Pulmonary-Critical Care Medicine agrees. “By mining multiple data streams and applying adaptive learning algorithms, we believe we can come up with new digital vital signs that are even more valuable than the signals we’re monitoring today,” he said. “This partnership will allow the team at Weil to expand the clinical use cases, develop intuitive clinical interfaces and increase system compatibility for the already integrative PICTURE product line. These clinical decision support systems could help us improve patient outcomes while reducing overall costs in the healthcare system.”
“PICTURE significantly outperforms several widely used deterioration and early warning systems and was meticulously developed with special features to ensure its performance, generalizability and usability are maximized,” said Dr. Sardar Ansari, Research Assistant Professor of Emergency Medicine and Director of the Weil’s Data Science Unit, “whether implemented at a tertiary care health facility or a community hospital.”
“The potential clinical impact for this technology and partnership is significant and poised for real patient impact.” said Drew Bennett, Director of Software and Content Licensing with U-M Innovation Partnerships. “It is a powerful combination to bring together the innovative clinical thinking of the Weil team with the technical and commercial expertise and reach of a partner like AirStrip. This is the type of additive combination one hopes for; the best of innovative leading edge academic research coupled with the disciplined technical and commercialization skills to truly change patient care. We are very excited to see this work move to the marketplace.”
“How the Weil Institute looks at the world aligns with AirStrip’s approach to health transformation,” said Portela. “With its ability to assimilate vast amounts of data and provide near-real-time analytics, PICTURE effectively complements AirStrip’s established position in clinical data interoperability and mobile patient surveillance. Our solutions hold the promise of measurably improving the clinical, operational and financial bottom lines in healthcare, delivering innovation that can measurably strengthen patient care while addressing real-world challenges faced by providers.”
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Disclosures
Dr. Ansari, Dr. Sjoding, and other U-M faculty have intellectual property on the analytics discussed in this article.
About AirStrip
AirStrip ONE® offers solutions that allow hundreds of health systems to unlock the full potential of their existing medical technology infrastructure investments with an interoperability platform that provides seamless access to clinical data and mobile actionable insights across the care continuum using remote access or web access granted by the health system. It features mobile diagnostic quality cardiac waveform viewing and sophisticated mobile fetal surveillance, providing clinicians with near-real-time contextual and clinically relevant data for situational awareness.
AirStrip
Wesley Hartline
SVP of Business Development, Revenue Growth
wesleyhartline@airstrip.com
About the Weil Institute, formerly MCIRCC
The team at the Max Harry Weil Institute for Critical Care Research and Innovation (formerly the Michigan Center for Integrative Research in Critical Care) is dedicated to pushing the leading edge of research to develop new technologies and novel therapies for the most critically ill and injured patients. Through a unique formula of innovation, integration and entrepreneurship that was first imagined by Weil, their multi-disciplinary teams of health providers, basic scientists, engineers, data scientists, commercialization coaches, donors and industry partners are taking a boundless approach to re-imagining every aspect of critical care medicine. For more information, visit weilinstitute.med.umich.edu.