UVA partners with MITRE to develop better health data analysis tools

University of Virginia Health System and The MITRE Corporation are partnering to develop better health data analysis tools to help prevent patients from getting sick and improving care while reducing healthcare costs.

"Electronic medical records and bedside monitors contain information that could be better used to enhance care or even prevent an illness from occurring," said Richard P. Shannon, MD, UVA's executive vice president for health affairs. "Our goal in working with MITRE is to learn how we can better harness that data to help our patients."

MITRE, a not-for-profit operator of federally funded research and development centers, focuses on new and expanded use of technology to address issues such as improving healthcare.

UVA has partnered with MITRE on other initiatives, but this will be their first collaboration in healthcare IT. Using advanced information technology skills, MITRE will advise UVA on optimizing a new computing system and research next-generation patient bedside monitoring capabilities, including precision analytics. UVA will share its knowledge with MITRE in areas of critical interest to MITRE's sponsors, including complex data environments, "smart" hospitals, healthcare research/reform and shared clinical analytics for improved patient care and safety.

"Better analytic tools could help hospitals and health systems across the U.S. discover new and better ways to care for their patients, using the data they are already collecting," said John Wilson, MITRE's vice president of programs and technology, Center for National Security. "The partnership will build on the ongoing work at UVA to predict when patients may develop certain illnesses or conditions and stop them from occurring."

For example, UVA Health System researchers led by J. Randall Moorman, MD and Douglas E. Lake, PhD, previously had developed a patented monitoring technology for premature infants that predict the infants' risk for sepsis. The new partnership with MITRE is accelerating monitoring technology for adults that is now entering clinical studies at UVA. The new monitors, which alert healthcare personnel to early changes of hemorrhage or lung failure, will be used first in the Surgical Intensive Care Unit, where Forrest Calland, MD, is the principal investigator.