As AI usage continues to rise in healthcare, Philips and Mass General Brigham (MGB) announced a new partnership on Feb. 20 that may help clinicians respond to patient needs faster by using real-time health data.
The global tech company and Massachusetts-based health system are teaming up to improve care with a platform that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to pull data from medical devices and quickly give it back to providers.
Providers regularly use medical devices like ventilators to monitor patients’ vitals. Philips offers its Capsule Medical Device Information Platform that collects and stores data on a continuous basis from medical devices—whether they’re Philips devices or not—including lab results and other standard health information typically found in an electronic medical record.
MGB already uses the Philips Capsule system across the health system, Tom McCoy, medical director of biomedical engineering at Massachusetts General Hospital, told Healthcare Brew. Through the partnership, the system aims to improve how that data is used and provide a more complete picture of a patient’s condition.
“This is to deliver more precise care—and faster—and it could actually save lives. Cardiac is where we started, but you can think of it as expanding to a lot of the other ologies over time,” Betsabeh Madani-Hermann, global head of research at Philips, said.
How it works. The team will start by focusing on cardiology and heart monitoring systems. Upon completion, the product will become part of Philip’s commercial offerings, which includes devices from MRIs to ultrasounds.
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The AI will collect data from patients undergoing continuous heart monitoring and analyze it to detect cardiac issues earlier, so patients can begin treatment sooner and potentially have better outcomes.
For example, the team is building an alert system that can track vital signs and sound an alarm when a patient’s data suggests a potential cardiac event so clinicians can respond more efficiently.
“The idea is that they could be developed [at Mass General], but they could be deployed anywhere,” McCoy said.
Madani-Hermann also said that by working with a health system, it’s “stress testing” the product from the start, as opposed to building it separately and trying to fit it to a hospital later.
In the long term, McCoy said it may become possible for the software to diagnose patients and create “closed loop systems where the software reads the signal and then directly controls the medical device.”
Zooming out. This is one of many partnerships between tech companies and health systems to integrate more AI into care.
Just look to the rise in AI scribes, where digital assistants are designed to ease the clinical note-taking process. Nabla and University of Iowa Health Care are one example, having inked a partnership last spring.