Portland, OR, March 15, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Artificial intelligence solutions company Synaptiq has launched a machine vision pilot program to help improve speed of care, patient outcomes, and reduce preventable deaths from hospital-borne Central Line-Associated Bloodstream Infections. The pilot program integrates Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare and will commence in Spring 2022 and run 3-6 months.
Central Line placement is a common procedure in a hospital intensive care unit with lifesaving applications. However, it is not risk-free: a Central Line-Associated Bloodstream Infection (CLABSI) occurs when bacteria or other harmful agents enter the bloodstream through a Central Line.
According to the NIH, these largely preventable infections occur in approximately 400,000 patients annually in the United States alone, resulting in over 28,000 deaths and costing U.S. hospitals $2 billion.
Healthcare workers follow protocols to prevent CLABSIs and ensure the area around the Central Line dressing is kept clean, dry, and intact. Patients and their families are also instructed to immediately notify care teams if the dressing is not in compliance. Caring for a patient with a Central Line requires precise attention to detail but infections still occur in U.S. intensive care units at a rate of 0.8 per 1,000 Central Line (CL) days. A “CL day” is a unit of time that measures how long a Central Line remains in a patient’s body.
In collaboration with Microsoft, Synaptiq built a Machine Vision demo solution to proactively inform care teams of potential Central Line dressing compliance issues. Machine vision is a type of artificial intelligence (AI) that enables computers to derive information from visual inputs. It can collect more precise visual data than human vision ever could and uses processing power to analyze the visual data faster and more thoroughly than the human mind.
Because visual cues play such a vital role in ensuring patient safety and preventing CLABSIs, Machine Vision has the potential to exponentially enhance care teams’ ability to recognize and respond to possible infections – before the human eye can even detect a problem is present.
“Our goal for this pilot is to leverage the extraordinary power of artificial intelligence, together with the hospital’s care teams and existing Microsoft applications, to help hospitals mitigate the CLABSI issue,” says Synaptiq CEO Stephen Sklarew. “As we continue to navigate the COVID-19 pandemic, when we talk to hospital leaders about what ‘keeps them up at night’ many cite CLABSIs as a top priority. Hospitals in our pilot program will have an exclusive early adopter opportunity to test the solution first-hand, and their care teams will be able to help design the future solution that best meets their needs.”
The AI-powered demo CLABSI solution helps care teams identify potential dressing compliance issues and alerts them to investigate.
The demo solution is powered by Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare, which provides capabilities to manage health data at scale and make it easier for healthcare organizations to enhance patient engagement and clinician experiences, empower health team collaboration, and improve clinical and operational insights, while helping support security, compliance, and interoperability of health data.
There are three applications that are part of the CLABSI solution:
- CLABSI assessment app (Microsoft Power Apps)
- CLABSI team (Microsoft Teams)
- CLABSI dashboard (Microsoft Power BI)
The CLABSI assessment app runs on a smartphone and is used to capture and analyze photos of patients’ dressings. If a potential compliance issue is identified, the CLABSI team is alerted to take action. Over time, data from the provider’s electronic medical system accumulates information from the CLABSI assessment app and the patient’s medical record, and the CLABSI dashboard provides a series of canned reports and ad hoc reporting capabilities to analyze CLABSI trends.
“AI and computer vision technology is empowering companies like Synaptiq to reduce care team stress, decrease cost of care, and, most importantly, improve patient outcomes,” said Jean Gabarra, Vice President, Health & Life Sciences AI at Microsoft Corp. “Synaptiq's CLABSI pilot program is a good example of how Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare can put advanced monitoring solutions into the hands of clinicians to enable better decision-making and help provide superior patient experiences.”
For more information or to apply for the 2022 CLABSI Pilot Program, visit the Synaptiq website.
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About Synaptiq
With over 60 clients in 20 sectors worldwide, Synaptiq exists to build a brighter world for future generations through novel applications of machine learning and AI. We build human-centered AI solutions and products to solve some of the hardest problems in business while upholding our firm commitment to ethics and transparency. Our team of management consultants, AI researchers, data scientists, and product development experts is characterized by bold creativity, intellectual curiosity, passion for impact, and the audacity to innovate on problems previously thought impossible to solve. For more information about Synaptiq please visit www.synaptiq.ai.
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