HP Partnership Benefits Patients

Busy doctors and nurses now have an efficient way to track key information about the young patients in the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit at Lucile Packard Children's Hospital. In collaboration with technologists at HP Labs, the hospital's physicians have developed electronic Patient-Centered Dashboards to present patient data in a central location that alerts caregivers to problems before they happen.

And this is just the beginning. Future collaborations between the organizations will be funded as part of a transformational $25 million, 10-year commitment by HP to support Packard Children's expansion and to fund cutting-edge research that enhances safety and quality of care for critically ill patients.

The dashboards help make sense of the data deluge in patients' electronic medical records, replacing and expanding the capability of traditional whiteboards that showed hand-written patient names, room numbers and responsible staff. For instance, dashboards can provide important information such as isolation status, highlight which patients may need increased levels of care, and display reminders about important steps in care that might get overlooked in a busy hospital setting.

"Electronic medical records are data-rich but information-poor," said Natalie Pageler, MD, clinical assistant professor of pediatrics at Stanford University School of Medicine and project manager for the Patient-Centered Dashboard at Packard Children's. "This pilot is a first step in translating the tremendous volumes of data we now have available in a hospital's electronic medical record system into practical information that can guide clinical decision making at the bedside of every patient."

Dashboards use red, yellow and green lights to help staff track the urgency of patients' needs. The dashboard might issue an alert to remove a catheter that is at risk for infection, change from IV to oral medication, decrease unneeded lab tests, or raise the head of a patient's bed to prevent ventilator-acquired pneumonia.

Pilot studies of the dashboard's effects show that they led to a change in care for one of every three patients in the pediatric intensive care unit. The combination of HP technology and Packard Children's expertise has the potential to help not just our patients but also to save lives at other children's and adult hospitals around the world.