See 17 TED MED-style talks on Children's Hospital Boston's latest devices, technologies, and clinical innovations
BOSTON, Feb. 2, 2012 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- On February 14 from 1 to 5 p.m., Children's Hospital Boston, will hosts its first "Innovation Day." In a series of 17 short sessions, cutting-edge approaches to improving care delivery and quality while lowering costs will be presented by the innovative leaders at Children's Hospital Boston.
The event is sponsored by the Innovation Acceleration Program (IAP), an 18-month-old program at Children's Hospital Boston charged with building resources to support the innovation process and removing obstacles to hospital-based innovation. The IAP is led by Chief Innovation Officer Naomi Fried, PhD. "Our group focuses on enhancing the culture of innovation that thrives at Children's. We support a wonderful community of innovators with funding, software development and advice," says Fried. "Children's innovative environment coupled with strategic support of innovation has resulted in some outstanding contributions to medicine and science."
Innovation Day is an opportunity to witness first-hand innovative ideas being turned into products, technologies and new care delivery models to improve the care of children. Some examples:
-- Peter Laussen, MBBS, is revolutionizing real-time data to catch critical
care crises before they happen. His T3 project aims to develop a
scalable and portable visualization and intelligent early warning system
to prospectively track the clinical course and trajectory of critically
ill patients, and allow critical care clinicians to move from
prescriptive and intuitive decision making to one that is predictive and
analytic.
-- Eric Fleegler, MD, MPH, and Eugenia Chan, MD, MPH, have developed a
web-based program designed to capture in real time how a child with a
chronic condition responds to medications when he is away from hospital.
The Integrated Clinical Information Sharing System (ICISS) is a
monitoring and management system that gathers real time (rather than
recounted by parents weeks later) information from patients, parents,
teachers and others care takers to monitor a child's health and
functional outcomes so clinicians can accurately assess and adjust
medication regimens. Its goal is to improve care coordination, decrease
unnecessary healthcare utilization, enhance clinical decision-making and
identify variations in care for defined patient populations.
-- "Think Pediatrics" is a cloud-based teaching platform designed by Jeff
Burns, MD, MPH, and Traci Wollbrink, MD, MPH, to aid and support
clinicians around the world. By harnessing the global reach of the
Internet, the latest knowledge can be shared instantly, providing
clinicians with life-saving information anywhere at any time.
"Pediatrics without Walls" is a comprehensive, continuously updated, and
peer-reviewed knowledge exchange platform dedicated to providing
multimedia and interactive teaching for physicians and nurses who are
caring for critically ill children. Developed in collaboration with IBM,
the March 2012 beta launch will include 1,000 users in hospitals across
six continents.
-- Thanks to the "Back to Sleep" campaign, babies are spending more time on
their backs, causing their skulls to flatten, a condition known as
plagiocephaly. But not every child needs to be evaluated by a neuro- or
craniofacial surgeon. A web-based program, designed by neurosurgeon
Joseph Madsen, MD, helps determine if a child can be referred to the
Children's brace shop for a plagiocephaly helmet. In consultation with
pediatricians, parents use cell phones and digital cameras as diagnostic
aids and send their photos to a website for Children's experts to
review. This telemedicine solution is enhancing efficiency, lowering
specialty consult costs and saving parents time and needless worry.
-- Delivering much-needed oxygen to the bloodstream during critical times,
such as asphyxia, cardiac arrest and hemorrhagic shock can be very
challenging. John Kheir, MD, has developed an oxygen micro-bubble foam
that can be injected directly into the bloodstream, delivering
lifesaving oxygen when and where it is most needed.
-- Developed by John Brownstein, PhD, HealthMap is an online resource
utilizing informal sources (e.g., newspaper articles, eyewitness
reports, expert-curated discussions and validated official reports) for
disease outbreak monitoring and real-time surveillance of emerging
public health threats. Through a website (http://healthmap.org) and
mobile app ('Outbreaks Near Me'), HealthMap delivers real-time
information on a broad range of infectious disease outbreaks. The
system publishes online information about emerging diseases in nine
languages, providing a view of the current global state of infectious
diseases and their effect on health and facilitating early detection of
global public health threats (e.g. H1N1 influenza).
-- Hiep T. Nguyen, MD, and his team is developing an implantable device for
more effective dialysis, calling it "Holly I." The device functions as
an "artificial kidney" with the benefits of both hemodialysis and
peritoneal dialysis.
-- Eye drops often provide quick relief to patients suffering from minor
eye problems such as redness, itching and dryness, but much of the dose
isn't absorbed. Doctors have found that drops do not work very well for
more serious chronic conditions such as glaucoma. Prototype multilayer
lenses, developed by Dan Kohane, MD, PhD, are a form of a contact lens
that sandwiches medicine between two layers of polymer film and
administers large doses of medication at constant rates over extended
period.
-- An invention called BEAPPER (Bidirectional Electronic Alert
Patient-Centered Provider Encounter Record) developed by Debra Weiner,
MD, PhD, is an iTouch/iPhone app designed to track a patient's progress
through the Emergency Department (ED). Coordinated care requires that
every member of busy multidisciplinary medical teams has access to
timely information about their patients' test results, imaging studies
and specialty consults so they can make expedient care decisions.
BEAPPER facilitates communication between emergency department providers
about shared patients and provides clinician support resources,
improving care delivery, parent satisfaction, and ED through put.
-- Pierre DuPont, PhD, is developing new robotic technologies and surgical
tools to convert intra-cardiac repairs to percutaneous, beating-heart
intervention. The innovation behind this technology enables the
fabrication of tools with design features that cannot be achieved by any
other manufacturing process. While developed for intra-cardiac surgery,
both the robotic platform and the tools are applicable to many other
types of surgery including neurosurgery, urology and orthopedics.
The event will be held in the Folkman Auditorium, Enders Pediatric Research Laboratories, Children's Hospital Boston, at 320 Longwood Avenue, Boston, Mass. The event will also be live streamed here. Please call the telephone number above or email for free parking information.
Founded in 1869 as a 20-bed hospital for children, Children's Hospital Boston has been ranked as one of the nation's best pediatric hospitals by U.S.News & World Report for the past 21 years. Children's is the primary pediatric teaching hospital of Harvard Medical School and the largest provider of health care to Massachusetts children. In addition to 395 pediatric and adolescent inpatient beds and 228 outpatient programs, Children's houses the world's largest research enterprise based at a pediatric medical center, where its discoveries benefit both children and adults. More than 1,100 scientists, including nine members of the National Academy of Sciences, 11 members of the Institute of Medicine and nine members of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute comprise Children's research community. For more information about the hospital visit: http://www.childrenshospital.org/newsroom.